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THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



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THE APOSTLES' 
CREED TO-DAY 



BY 

EDWARD S. DROWN, D.D. 

Professor in the Episcopal Theological 
School in Cambridge 



Jfam fork 

THE M ACM ILL AN COMPANY 
1917 



All rights reserved 




Copyright, 1917, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, January, 1917. 



FEB -I 1917 



©CLA455385 



/ believe in God the Father Almighty, 
Maker of heaven and earth: 

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: 
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born 
of the Virgin Mary : Suffered under Pontius 
Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried: He 
descended into hell; The third day he rose 
again from the dead: He ascended into 
heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God 
the Father Almighty: From thence he shall 
come to judge the quick and the dead. 

I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy 
Catholic Church; the Communion of Saints: 
The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection 
of the body: And the Life everlasting. 
Amen. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Creeds and Liberty 1 . 3 

II The Origin and Character of the 

Apostles' Creed 25 

III The Creed and the Bible ... 47 

IV The Interpretation of the Apos- 

tles' Creed To-day 65 

V The Value and Use of the Creed 

To-day 111 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



I 

CREEDS AND LIBERTY 

TS a creed a restraint on religious liberty? 

So it is often maintained. Creeds are 
regarded as shackles, fetters on freedom. 
It is held that the road to freedom is through 
the abolition of creeds. 

If creeds are really fetters on freedom, 
modern men can have no interest in creeds. 
We demand liberty; liberty of thought and 
of life, liberty in the state, industrial liberty 
— above all, liberty of conscience in all things 
that pertain to our relation with God. The 
fight for liberty is the fight of the modern 
world. With a great price purchased we 
this freedom, and there remaineth yet very 
much land to be possessed. If religion is to 
keep its place in the modern world, it must 
not merely tolerate the demand for liberty 

3 



4 THE APOSTLES , CREED TO-DAY 



— it must insist upon it. For no freedom is 
perfectly secured unless it is founded on re- 
ligious freedom — the freedom of man's re- 
lation with God. 

If then creeds are a shackle on freedom, 
creeds cannot permanently be maintained. 
They must be defended, if at all, in no faint- 
hearted, apologetic way. It will not be 
enough to prove that their restraints on free- 
dom are not very serious. The issue must 
be more boldly faced. Creeds must be 
shown to be guarantees of liberty. It must 
be shown that their abolition would conduce 
to bondage rather than to freedom. Only 
such a contention can vindicate the rightful 
place for creeds. A half-hearted defence 
must be abandoned for a bold attack. 

I 

For this purpose it is necessary to examine 
the idea of freedom in some of its varied 
spheres. Take, first, the age long contro- 
versy as to the freedom of the will. It has 
sometimes been thought that if a man is free 
he must be free to will anything. A bad man 
is free at once to become a saint, and a saint 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



to become a villain. A loving mother is 
free to feed her baby or to let it starve. 
Freedom of the will means freedom to act 
in any way that is logically possible. 

Such a theory is so radically untrue to fact 
that it must produce reaction. If that be 
freedom, then there is no freedom. The 
will is plainly limited. Determinism will 
have the best of the battle against any such 
idea of arbitrary freedom. 

The fact is that freedom cannot be sepa- 
rated from a right relation to one's environ- 
ment. Freedom and experience go hand in 
hand. On the one hand, man is not a thing. 
He is not the mere sport of outward circum- 
stance. He can become the master and not 
the slave of his own nature and of his en- 
vironment. On the other hand, he can at- 
tain such free mastery only as he grasps the 
truth of his own nature and of the environ- 
ment in which he is placed. Freedom is a 
growth, and it grows only through knowl- 
edge of the truth and obedience to that truth. 
If a man's will acts arbitrarily, without rela- 
tion to his own nature and to his circum- 
stances, then his will enslaves him instead of 



6 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



freeing him. A man lost in the woods can 
go any way that he likes. But by that very 
fact he cannot escape from them. He finds 
a path, and in following it he wins his free- 
dom. A ship at sea without chart or com- 
pass is the sport of accident. Chart and 
compass reveal its true position and open up 
freedom to reach the desired haven. Free 
control over nature comes only through 
knowledge of and obedience to the laws of 
nature. As scientific knowledge of nature in- 
creases, scientific control over nature grows 
by leaps and bounds, and man's free control 
of nature grows apace. Freedom consists 
always in a relation to the truth. Only by 
knowledge of truth can man's will be set free 
from bondage to his environment. By obe- 
dience to law he becomes master instead of 
slave. 

All this is just as true of political freedom. 
Political freedom does not come at the begin- 
ning of history. It is an end to be achieved, 
and to be achieved only as right relations are 
developed between man and man. The free 
savage is a figment of the imagination. He 
is bound by traditions, customs, the hard ne- 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



cessities of life. Thomas Hobbes was per- 
fectly right in maintaining that a state with- 
out law was a state where every man was de- 
prived of his rights. Anarchy is but another 
name for tyranny. The individual citizen 
becomes free as the community establishes 
itself in law and order. Laws that truly ex- 
press the constitution of society at the same 
time secure the freedom of the citizen. 
Laws guard and protect that freedom. 
Covenants are signed that it may be de- 
fended. Magna Charta guarded the rights 
of men. When the men on the Mayflower 
put their names to that compact, did they sign 
away their freedom or secure it? When the 
Declaration of Independence was signed was 
that signature an act of slavery? When the 
Constitution of the United States brought or- 
der out of confusion and light out of dark- 
ness did it impose slavery or liberty upon 
the nation? 

Freedom of the will goes hand in hand 
with the discovery of truth. Freedom in the 
State goes hand in hand with the growth of 
law. 

Of course the law must be true law; that 



8 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



is, it must be law that rightly expresses the 
nature of the community and the relation to 
each other of its citizens. When law dis- 
torts those relations, then law becomes 
tyranny. But the escape from tyranny is not 
through the abolition of law, but through its 
reformation. Anarchy is the opposite of 
freedom. Freedom exists in proportion as 
the community has come to a true realisation 
of itself, and has expressed itself in true 
laws. Freedom consists in right relation to 
law. 

These principles are equally true of that 
freedom which to-day is still so far to seek, 
industrial freedom. Some men are to-day 
industrially the slaves of other men, or are 
the slaves of our modern economic structure, 
a structure which has grown with great ra- 
pidity, and whose laws are as yet very imper- 
fectly understood. There are men of strong 
bodies, of good minds, of ready wills, who yet 
are unable to secure for themselves and their 
families the reasonable requirements of de- 
cent living. Rich and poor alike, even with 
the best desires, are unable to break away 
from that vicious circle in which the pros- 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



perity of one is the poverty of others. How 
is that desired freedom to be won? 

Only by a deeper knowledge of the social 
structure and of its economic laws. Mere 
charity, in the ordinary sense, is only a pallia- 
tive. The demand for justice is a demand 
for a knowledge of the truth, for a deeper 
knowledge of the laws that express the true 
relations between men and men, and between 
men and money. No scheme can stand that 
is not the outcome of a searching knowledge 
of the truth. Only through such knowledge 
can we establish the free commonwealth, in 
which the good of one shall be the good of 
all. 

In every case freedom comes only through 
the truth. Whether we are speaking of free- 
dom of the will, of political freedom, or of 
industrial freedom, in any case we are free 
only by being put into true relations with our 
fellowmen. 

II 

Such considerations should cast light on 
the character of religious freedom and on its 
relation to creeds. Religious freedom con- 



io THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



sists in a man's ability to express himself 
truly in his relation to God and to his fel- 
lows. Alike to God and to his fellows. 
For religion is never a matter of relation to 
God alone. It is also a matter of human 
fellowship brought about by that relation, 
real or supposed, to God. From its begin- 
nings religion has been a social rather than 
a purely individual matter. Religion began 
not with the individual, but with the tribe or 
clan or family. And as religion developed it 
has always been a means through which men 
were knit together by a common belief in 
their common relation to God. Even in its 
most individualistic forms religion has always 
offered a basis for some fellowship, even 
although that fellowship may have been con- 
ceived in most narrow terms, the admission 
into a small coterie of those who are initiated 
into a common access to the divine. The re- 
lation to God, or to a god, has always been 
regarded as opening up something of a com- 
mon relation among men. 

All this is supremely true of Christianity. 
Nothing is more distinctively true of the 
Christian gospel than that it reveals a rela- 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



tion with God which is at the same time a 
fellowship among men. Jesus exalts the in- 
dividual life, in that He reveals the divine 
sonship of man and his relation to his heav- 
enly Father. But the first word of His 
preaching is the Kingdom of God, and that 
is a social concept, that of human life under 
the rule of God. The divine sonship that 
Jesus revealed can never be separated from, 
must indeed be expressed in, the life of 
neighbourhood. The two great command- 
ments, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," 
and " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy- 
self," cannot be separated. They are but dif- 
ferent sides of the gospel of the divine Fa- 
therhood. 

This union of the individual and the social 
runs through the whole New Testament from 
cover to cover. The Apostle Paul opens up 
the richness of the individual life, created 
through its surrender to God. The doctrine 
of justification by faith puts man in direct re- 
lation to God through Christ, exalts the in- 
dividual, and establishes the supremacy of the 
individual conscience. But, it has been well 
said, to St. Paul the primal mystery of the 



12 THE APOSTLES , CREED TO-DAY 

gospel was the mystery of human unity, the 
overcoming of all outward marks that sepa- 
rate man from man, the discovery of the stu- 
pendous fact that there is no difference be- 
tween the Jew and the Greek, for the same 
Lord is Lord of all. St. John is sometimes 
called the mystic of the New Testament. 
And the mystic is often supposed to be one 
who in immediate contact with the life of 
God is separated from the world and from 
the life of men. Yet St. John says in the 
plainest words, " If a man say, I love God, 
and hateth his brother, he is a liar." The 
love of God is not a reality unless it ex- 
presses itself in the life of men. To the 
whole New Testament the fellowship with 
God is also a fellowship with the children of 
God. 

Later Christianity has had many faults 
and aberrations, but it has never utterly lost 
that ideal. It lies at the very heart of the 
belief in the Church. For the Church, 
rightly taken, stands for the ideal of a fel- 
lowship among men that is rooted and 
grounded on fellowship with God. In the 
deepest sense all Christian life is life in the 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



Church, that is in fellowship. Take the 
word Church in no narrow or sectarian inter- 
pretation, and the old saying, so often mis- 
used, becomes true in the deepest sense, 
" There is no salvation outside of the 
Church." For the heart of that saying is 
that there can be no fellowship with God un- 
less it is realised through fellowship with 
men, that the love of God means love of the 
brethren. 

This brings us back to the statement that 
religious freedom consists in a man's ability 
to express himself truly in his relation to God 
and to his fellows. What bearing on such 
liberty has a creed? 

ill 

It is necessary to distinguish carefully be- 
tween a creed as such and an underlying the- 
ology or philosophy. Every religion has 
something corresponding to a theology, but 
not every religion has a creed in a distinctive 
sense. A creed properly taken embraces 
such elements of religious belief as are re- 
garded as vital to the religious fellowship. 
In this sense it can hardly be said that the 



i 4 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



ancient religions of Greece or Rome had a 
creed. They had a theology, a general com- 
plex of religious and philosophical ideas, 
which were held more or less in common. 
But this complex of ideas was not regarded 
as a badge of fellowship. The mark of fel- 
lowship lay rather in the ritual, and he who 
performed the ritual was admitted to free re- 
ligious fellowship without any question as to 
his belief. That belief was practically a mat- 
ter of free discussion by the philosophers. 
Probably the same thing can be said in gen- 
eral of the religions of India. There was 
underlying them an immense mass of theol- 
ogy or philosophy. But questions as to such 
theology were apparently free, and it is prob- 
able that no mere difference of opinion could 
have produced religious alienation. There 
may be a partial exception in Buddhism, 
whose conception of the Way or the Path 
may be considered as a sort of creed or com- 
mon basis of thought leading to fellowship. 

But one thing is clear. There are certain 
religions in which a positive definite creed 
emerges, and in which acceptance of that 
creed is regarded as vital to the fellowship of 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



that religion. The religion of Israel had 
such a creed. It finds definite expression as 
follows: " Hear, O Israel: the Lord our 
God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with 
all thy soul, and with all thy might. And 
these words, which I command thee this day, 
shall be upon thine heart : and thou shalt teach 
them diligently unto thy children, and shalt 
talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, 
and when thou walkest by the way, and when 
thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon 
thine hand, and they shall be for frontlets 
between thine eyes. And thou shalt write 
them upon the door posts of thy house, and 
upon thy gates." 1 The acceptance of the 
Lord as God becomes a creed, a badge of 
fellowship. 

Mohammedanism has its creed. " There 
is no God except Allah, and Mohammed is 
his prophet." Under that creed the body of 
the faithful form a fellowship. Something 
of the same kind can be said of the ancient 
Persian religion of Zarathustra or Zoroaster. 

1 Deut. 6:4-9. 



1 6 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



Allegiance to the God of light against the 
power of darkness became a badge of fellow- 
ship. In all these cases we have not merely 
an underlying theology, but we have certain 
fundamental ideas expressing allegiance to a 
common God. And that allegiance and the 
beliefs that went with it become a pledge 
of a common fellowship. 

All these religions are distinctly fighting 
religions. Each one is concerned with its 
own truth as vital. Each is in a sense an in- 
tolerant religion, that is it regards its own 
truth as a thing to be fought for. There is 
a great difference between such religions and 
the easy going tolerance of Greece and Rome, 
a tolerance that rested not upon a conviction 
of the rights of conscience, the only true basis 
for toleration, but upon an indifference to 
truth, or at least upon the suspicion that all 
ideas are in some way equally true. But 
these fighting religions have had aggressive 
power, they have had a distinctly missionary 
element. For, realising that religion implies 
truth, they could not be indifferent to truth 
and to its propagation. 

Now the Christian religion had a creed 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



from very early times. Not, of course, a 
formal creed. That came later. But in the 
New Testament it is perfectly clear that the 
early Christians were knit together in a com- 
mon allegiance to their Lord, and that that 
allegiance was expressed in an elementary 
creedal form. The heart of this was the con- 
fession of Jesus as Lord and Christ. Per- 
haps its earliest form was that Jesus was the 
Christ, or more strictly that the Christ was 
Jesus. There is given no single form of 
words, but the importance of such a funda- 
mental confession of faith in Christ is clearly 
seen. The following passages will serve as 
examples: " Every one therefore who shall 
confess me before men, him will I also con- 
fess before my Father which is in heaven." 1 
" If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus 
as Lord, and shalt believe in thy heart that 
God raised him from the dead, thou shalt 
be saved: for with the heart man believeth 
unto righteousness; and with the mouth con- 
fession is made unto salvation/' 2 " That 
every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ 



iMatt. 10:32, cf. Luke 12:8. 
2 Rom. 10: 9-10. 



1 8 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." 1 
" Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the 
Son of God, God abideth in him and he in 
God." 2 And the following passage is very 
probably a quotation from an early hymn or 
confession of faith: " He who was mani- 
fested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen 
of angels, preached among the nations, be- 
lieved on in the world, received up in glory." 8 
These passages sufficiently indicate the funda- 
mental confession of Christ which lay at the 
basis of the Christian fellowship. 

A creed then is primarily an expression of 
religious allegiance and a badge of religious 
fellowship. It is not first a mere theology, a 
mere collection of dogmas or beliefs. It is 
primarily an expression of faith or belief, 
belief taken in a personal rather than in an 
intellectual sense, belief conceived of as trust 
or allegiance. It carries with it, of course, 
intellectual contents. But those intellectual 
contents are but the expression of a funda- 
mental act of trust. 

1 Phil. »: ii. 

2 I John 4:15. Cf. I John 4:2-3, and II John, verse 7. 

3 I Tim. 3:16. 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



IV 

Now is such a creed enslaving? Yes, if 
the path through the woods is enslaving to the 
man who is lost. Yes, if the map and com- 
pass are enslaving to the ship at sea. Yes, if 
the Declaration of Independence and the 
Constitution of the United States are shackles 
on liberty. But if path and compass and 
map and constitution are means to secure lib- 
erty, and to escape from slavery, then may 
not a creed expressing a common allegiance 
serve the same purpose? If religious fellow- 
ship rests upon such common allegiance and 
upon the truth that that allegiance implies, 
then a creed expressing that allegiance and 
that truth is not a badge of slavery but of 
freedom. 

It is an easy supposition that the abolition 
of all creeds would make for religious, for 
Christian, freedom. The question as to how 
the abolition of the Apostles' Creed would 
affect freedom can be discussed only after we 
have considered the character of that creed. 
Here the question concerns creeds in general. 
And there is no more reason to suppose that 



20 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



the abolition of all creeds would make for 
liberty in the Church any more than the abo- 
lition of constitutions and laws would make 
for liberty in the State. If men were only 
isolated individuals they would need no con- 
stitutions, no laws, and no creeds. But if 
men find their true life not in isolation but in 
fellowship, and if that fellowship rests on the 
discovery of true relations between men, then 
laws and constitutions are but the road to 
freedom. And if religious freedom goes 
hand in hand with religious fellowship, then 
the creed that maintains that fellowship is but 
an expression of the truth that makes men 
free. 

Of course a creed may be misused. It may 
be interpreted in a narrow and coercive way. 
So may laws and constitutions be misused. 
Or a creed may be a false creed, expressing 
untrue relations and narrowing fellowship. 
So may constitutions and laws be falsely 
formed and thus may produce slavery. 
There is the danger of tyranny, whether in 
State or Church. And always men are to be 
found who hold that tyranny can be destroyed 
only by anarchy, that liberty can be main- 



CREEDS AND LIBERTY 



tained only by the abolition of law. But that 
way madness lies. The cure for misuse of 
law is right use of law. The cure for bad 
law is good law. When laws rightly express 
the life of a people and are administered to 
protect that life, then they are the guarantees 
of freedom. So must it be with Christian 
liberty. If a creed is a false creed or is 
falsely used, then it will produce slavery. 
But the cure for that slavery will be a true 
creed and a true conception of its use. The 
question then comes as to whether or not the 
Apostles' Creed is such a true expression of 
the Christian allegiance and the Christian fel- 
lowship, and if so how it is to be interpreted 
and used. That brings us to the subject of 
the next chapter, the origin and character of 
the Apostles' Creed. 



THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 
OF THE APOSTLES' CREED 



II 



THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE 
APOSTLES' CREED 



HREE things are immediately to be said 



about the Apostles' Creed. In the first 
place, it was not written by the Apostles. 
Later tradition ascribed it to them, even go- 
ing so far as to assign its separate clauses to 
individual members of the Twelve. We 
know now that, although it may claim a right 
to its title on the ground that it correctly ex- 
presses apostolic thought, yet it dates from 
a time much later than that of the Apostles. 

In the second place, the Apostles' Creed 
was not composed all at once. It was the 
result of a growth, taking centuries to reach 
its present form. 

In the third place, the Apostles' Creed is 
not a universal creed. There were many 
creeds in use in the early Church, and the 
particular development which resulted in the 




26 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



Apostles' Creed took place in the West. 
While common to the Church of Rome and 
nearly all Protestantism, yet it is not used 
in the Eastern Churches, and is not strictly 
an ecumenical creed. 

These considerations suggest that the 
creed is not to be regarded as a fixed and 
final formula for Christian faith. The creed 
is the product of the life of the Church. 
And it is therefore to be interpreted as a liv- 
ing product. Its character and meaning can 
therefore be understood only by its history. 
What were the causes that produced this 
creed? How is it related to the New Testa- 
ment? How is it related to the life and ex- 
perience of the Church? How does its his- 
tory affect its interpretation and cast light on 
its value and use to-day? 

I 

The Apostles' Creed in substantially its 
present form can be traced back to the middle 
of the sixth century. But this creed was de- 
veloped from a creed of which we have a 
definite account in the fourth century, and 
which was used in the Church of Rome. 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 



This Roman creed is preserved in Latin in 
the writings of Rufinus of Aquileia about 
400 A. D. A translation runs as follows : 
/ believe in God the Father Almighty: and 
in Christ Jesus, His only Son, our Lord, who 
was born of the Holy Ghost from Mary the 
Virgin, crucified under Pontius Pilate and 
buried; on the third day He rose from the 
dead, ascended into the heavens, sitteth on 
the right hand of the Father; from thence 
He shall come to judge quick and dead. 
And in the Holy Ghost, holy Church, for- 
giveness of sins, resurrection of flesh. 

This creed is also given in Greek by Mar- 
cellus of Ancyra, about 341 A. D. This form 
differs from that given by Rufinus only by 
the omission of the word u Father " in the 
first clause, and by the addition of the clause, 
" eternal life." Although Greek was prob- 
ably the original language of this creed, and 
although the testimony of Marcellus shows 
that it was in use at Rome before the middle 
of the fourth century, yet the text as it comes 
to us from Rufinus is more reliably preserved 
and is therefore to be preferred. 1 

1 For the form in Greek and Latin see A. E. Burn, An 



28 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



It will be seen that the more important dif- 
ferences between this creed and our present 
creed consists in the lack of the following 
words and phrases: " Maker of heaven and 
earth," the word 11 conceived," the words 
" suffered " and " dead," the phrase " He de- 
scended into hell," the word u Catholic," and 
the phrases " communion of saints " and 
" life everlasting." 

But now this creed in use in the fourth cen- 
tury, and which differs so little from our creed 
to-day, can itself be traced back to a creed in 
use in Rome at about the middle of the sec- 
ond century, perhaps earlier. This creed 
has not come down to us in absolutely definite 
form, but has to be collected from various 
sources. Consequently we cannot be sure as 
to its exact contents. Some scholars, includ- 
ing Prof. Harnack, think it to be practically 
the same as the creed of Rufinus. Others 
hold that it was shorter. Prof. McGiffert 
gives the following as its probable form: 

/ believe in God the Father almighty and 

Introduction to the Creeds, p. 46. McGiffert, The Apos- 
tles* Creed, pp. 42-3. Kattenbusch, Das apostolische Sym- 
bol, Vol. I, pp. 62 ff. 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 



in Christ Jesus his son, who was born of 
Mary the Virgin, was crucified under Pontius 
Pilate and buried, on the third day rose from 
the dead, ascended into heaven, sitteth on the 
right hand of the Father, from whence he 
cometh to judge quick and dead; and in Holy 
Spirit, resurrection of flesh. 1 

We find then a creed at least as long as 
the above form, and perhaps as fully devel- 
oped as that of Rufinus, in use at Rome by 
about 150 A. D. ; perhaps earlier. What 
was the origin and character of this earlier 
creed? 

II 

In regard to it two things are quite clear. 
In the first place it was closely connected 
with Baptism. It may have been used as a 
basis for the instruction of catechumens, 
those to be baptised, or it may have been 
used as a confession of faith on the part of 
the candidate at the time of Baptism. In 
either case it was essentially a baptismal 
creed. 

In the second place, this creed was an 

1 The Apostles' Creed, p. 7. 



3 o THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



enlargement or development of the formula 
used in Baptism. The person to be baptised 
in the name of the Father and of the Son 
and of the Holy Spirit expressed his faith in 
that Name, or received his preparation for 
Baptism through instruction as to the mean- 
ing of that Name. The creed is the expan- 
sion of the baptismal formula. To under- 
stand then the origin and character of this 
creed, we must consider the subject of Bap- 
tism, and especially the form of words used 
in Baptism. What was the original baptis- 
mal formula? 

It might seem as though that question 
were definitely answered for us by the say- 
ing of Jesus, " Go ye therefore, and make 
disciples of all the nations, baptising them 
into the name of the Father and of the Son 
and of the Holy Ghost." 1 But here we 
meet with a difficulty. This is the only place 
in the New Testament where Baptism is 
spoken of as given in the name of the Trin- 
ity. Baptism is mentioned many times in 
the New Testament. But with the excep- 
tion of this one passage it is mentioned either 

1 Matt. 28:19. 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 



without any formula given, or with some 
such form as " in " or " into Christ," or 
" into the name of the Lord Jesus. " Exam- 
ples of this are so common in Acts and in the 
epistles of St. Paul that it is not necessary to 
quote cases. 1 If it were not for this one pas- 
sage in Matthew we should take it for granted 
that early Baptism was always given in the 
name of Jesus or Christ. How shall we 
explain this diversity? 

It may be contended that these words of 
Jesus were spoken, and afterwards were for 
a time forgotten or disregarded. But this 
seems most unlikely. 

It may be held that two different formulas 
were in use, and that they were regarded as 
equivalent in meaning. Inasmuch as Bap- 
tism into the name of Jesus implied Baptism 
into the name of the Father and of the Holy 
Spirit, it was not necessary to distinguish 
between the two formulas. Such a view 
would have the truth that these two forms 
undoubtedly had the same essential contents, 

1 See the following passages: Acts 2:38, 8:16, 10:48, 
19:5, Rom. 6:3, I Cor. 1:12-16 (where the argument 
implies that they were baptised not into the name of 
Paul, but into the name of Christ) Gal. 3:27. 



32 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



and to this truth we must shortly return. 
But it is very unlikely that two such different 
formulas existed side by side in the apostolic 
practice. 

The most probable explanation, and the 
one now generally accepted by New Testa- 
ment scholars, is that originally Baptism was 
given in the name of Jesus or of Christ, and 
that the Trinitarian form is a later, even 
although a perfectly legitimate, development 
of the original formula. He who was bap- 
tised into the name of the Lord Jesus was 
baptised into the name of the Father whom 
He revealed, and into the name of the Spirit 
whom He brought. The Trinitarian form 
became established, and the earlier form 
gradually disappeared from use. 

But how then about the Trinitarian form 
given to us in the words of our Lord? Did 
Jesus not speak these words? We must 
remember that in the Gospels we do not have 
a literal transcript of our Lord's words. In 
the first place He did not speak in Greek but 
in Aramaic. In the second place our sources 
for His sayings are complex. These sayings 
were originally preserved by tradition. 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 



They were incorporated into a collection of 
His sayings, ascribed to St. Matthew, and 
into the earliest of our Gospels, that of St. 
Mark. These two sources are doubtless 
the basis of our present synoptic Gospels. 
These contain reliable testimony as to the 
life and words of our Lord. But they can- 
not be stressed to verbal accuracy. They 
carry clear evidences of later recensions, of 
changes creeping in, of modifications that 
express the different points of view of the 
writers. To obtain the real words of our 
Lord we are obliged to compare our sources 
and to get back to their underlying sub- 
stratum. In many cases we can do this with 
confidence that we have reliable evidence as 
to our Lord's words. In other cases we 
must frankly recognise that later elements 
have crept in, and that we have reflections of 
a later time. This passage in St. Matthew 
is most probably such a reflection. After 
the Trinitarian formula had become general 
it was reflected back by tradition, and was, 
with entire honesty, supposed to have come 
from Jesus Himself. There is no reason 
why Christian believers should be disturbed 



34 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



by this result. The Gospels are pictures 
rather than strict historical writings. And 
while we can be very sure of fundamenal 
and original elements contained in them, we 
must also recognise the effect of later tradi- 
tion. 

Indeed the result here reached can be seen 
to be distinctly helpful in our understanding 
of the nature and meaning of the early creed. 
If primitive Baptism was in the name of the 
Lord Jesus, then the primary attitude on the 
part of the man to be baptised was faith in 
the Lord Jesus. That Jesus was the Christ, 
or more strictly that the Christ who was to 
come was Jesus, this was the primary Chris- 
tian confession of faith. This confession 
became a fact in Baptism. 

Here we have the essential germ of the 
early Christian creed. It was the confession 
of Christ. We have an early form of such 
a confession preserved for us in an interpola- 
tion that at some early date crept into the 
text of the eighth chapter of Acts, the saying 
of the Ethiopian eunuch at his Baptism, " I 
believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." 1 

1 Acts 8:37. See Revised Version, margin. 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 



Although this is doubtless not a part of the 
original text, yet it well illustrates the early 
confession of faith made at Baptism. We 
may compare with this the passages of a 
creedal character in the New Testament 
which have been already quoted in the pre- 
ceding chapter, as also the saying of St. Paul, 
" Other foundation can no man lay than that 
which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." 1 The 
foundation of the Christian faith is Jesus 
Christ. 

Now see what happened. Baptism came 
to be administered in the name of the 
Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
Ghost. And, as previously pointed out, this 
development was no departure from the 
meaning of the original formula. He who 
was baptised into the name of Jesus was also 
baptised into the name of the Father whom 
Jesus revealed. The Christian God was the 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He that 
knew the Son knew the Father also. This 
knowledge of the Father through Jesus 
Christ His Son was one fundamental element 
of the Christian experience. 

1 l Cor. 3:11. 



3 6 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



And the other fundamental element was 
the life of the Spirit. The New Testament 
through and through is the book of the Holy 
Spirit. Through Christ the followers of 
Christ were knit together into a new com- 
pany. And the bond that united them was 
a divine bond. They were in possession of, 
or rather possessed by, a new and living 
Spirit. In Baptism into Christ they were 
baptised into the Holy Spirit of God. Thus 
Baptism into the name of Jesus became Bap- 
tism into the name of the Father and of the 
Son and of the Holy Ghost. This was no 
new Baptism. It was but making explicit 
that which was implicit in Baptism into 
Christ. Small wonder that a later gener- 
ation with spiritual if not with literal truth 
put that form of Baptism into the words of 
Christ. In so doing they were building on 
that foundation than which no other could 
be laid. 

Hence the creed. The man to be bap- 
tised into the name of the Father and of the 
Son and of the Holy Ghost, said, " I believe 
in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy 
Ghost." The primary creed was but the 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 



expression of the baptismal formula. And 
the essence of that creed was belief in Jesus. 
The primary part of the creed was the second 
part, " I believe in Jesus Christ." 

So much as this then can be clearly seen; 
the triune formula in Baptism was the out- 
come of Baptism into the name of Jesus, and 
the early creed was the expression of this 
formula. Baptism into Christ issued in Bap- 
tism in the name of the Trinity, and this 
Trinitarian formula was the basis of the creed 
which we find in use in the middle of the sec- 
ond century. So far we are on sure ground. 1 

III 

But now we come to a more disputed ques- 
tion. This creed contained much more than 
a simple expression of belief in Father, Son, 

1 It is held by McGiffert that the words of St. Paul in 
II Cor. 13:14, "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and 
the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost" 
are the immediate basis of the early Roman creed, rather 
than the form given by St. Matthew. It hardly seems 
that McGiffert's argument meets the fact that the creed 
is in order and in general form more nearly akin to 
the passage in St. Matthew, than to that in second 
Corinthians. But, however that may be, the results as 
stated above are not materially affected. 



3 8 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



and Holy Ghost. In the form given by 
Runnus and in use in the fourth century, it 
contained nearly all the contents of our pres- 
ent Apostles' Creed. And the form in exist- 
ence in the middle of the second century if 
not identical with that used by Rufinus was 
at any rate nearly so. It contained a large 
number of additional clauses not found in 
the baptismal formula. It was not simply 
an expression of that formula but an expan- 
sion of it. At the very least it added the 
word " almighty " to the belief in God, it in- 
cluded the birth, crucifixion and burial of our 
Lord, His resurrection, ascension, session at 
the right hand of the Father, and coming 
again to judge the quick and the dead. After 
the words " Holy Ghost " it included the 
phrase " resurrection of the flesh." In addi- 
tion it very likely had the word " only " 
before " Son," and in the last division the 
phrases " Holy Church " and " forgiveness 
of sins." How did these additional clauses 
come into the creed? What were the rea- 
sons that led to this expansion of the bap- 
tismal formula? 

There are two theories, positive and 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 



polemic. The positive theory holds that the 
development of the creed was in order to 
incorporate in it the main positive elements 
of the Christian faith. The polemic theory 
holds that this development was intended to 
reject erroneous views or heresies, as those 
heresies came into existence and were seen to 
be hostile to the Christian faith. 

The former view holds then that the creed 
was intended to give a brief summary of the 
main contents of Christian belief, such as 
would naturally form the basis of instruction 
before Baptism. Thus the creed emphasises 
the main outline of the life of Christ, giving 
a brief summary of the gospel story. It 
gives the elements of belief in God the Father 
and in the Holy Spirit, and the resurrection, 
very probably also of belief in the holy 
Church and the forgiveness of sins. These 
were looked upon as the essential elements of 
the Christian faith. 

This view has been strongly maintained 
by Harnack, who finds little of polemic char- 
acter in the early creed. The same position 
is well put by C. H. Turner, as follows: 
" The most important caution to be given at 



4 o THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



this point is that we must be chary of attribut- 
ing to the less conscious creed-formation of 
the second century the same motives which 
animated the more conscious work of the 
fourth. We must not assume, because the 
new clauses of the Creed of Nicaea were 
aimed directly against Arius, that the expan- 
sion by which the earlier Creed recited its be- 
lief in the Incarnation, Passion, and Resur- 
rection of Jesus Christ was directed against 
Docetism, or the expansions of the belief in 
the Holy Ghost against other aspects of the 
Gnostic movement. In other words, we 
must allow for more of a positive element in 
the earlier stages of the Creed than in the 
later; there was more of the desire to em- 
body in brief compass the most fundamental 
heads of the Church's own belief, less, as yet, 
of the intention to erect sign-posts of warn- 
ing against the deviations of heresy. . . . 
Perhaps in the clause on the resurrection of 
the flesh we first meet with something like 
definite antagonism to Gnostic error." 1 
On the other hand the polemic theory 

1 Use of Creeds and Anathemas in the Early Church, 
p. 15 f. 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 41 



holds that practically the whole expansion of 
the creed was negative or polemic in charac- 
ter, and that it was especially directed against 
the heresy of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was 
the greatest theological foe of early Christi- 
anity. It was a strange complex of Greek 
and other elements. It tended to incorporate 
into itself certain Christian ideas, and then to 
present itself as true Christianity. It held 
that the true God is a being removed by a 
vast distance from the world, and having con- 
nection with it only by a long and gradually 
descending scale of semi-divine beings or 
" aeons." The creator of the world, who 
was considered to be identical with the God 
of the Old Testament, was one of these aeons, 
quite low down in the scale, and he made 
poor work of creation. The world, espe- 
cially the fleshly nature of man, was essen- 
tially evil. The heavenly Christ was a being 
of a much higher order, who came down to 
earth to impart a spiritual nature to certain 
favoured souls, and thus to rescue them from 
this evil world. He did not really become 
man, but temporarily entered a human body. 
He was not really born, and did not really 



42 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



suffer or die. All this was only appearance. 
Hence the so-called heresy of Docetism, 
meaning to " seem," namely, that his human- 
ity was only a semblance. Returning to his 
heavenly estate he opened up to the Gnostic, 
the one who knew, the enlightened man, the 
possibility of a spiritual nature and the way 
of escape from the evil flesh. 

Fantastic as all this seems to us, Gnos- 
ticism was a great source of danger to the 
early Church. One of its chief representa- 
tives was Marcion. Prof. McGiffert holds 
that practically all the new clauses introduced 
into the early creed were directed against 
the heresies of Marcion. The word " al- 
mighty " applied to God, the statement that 
Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, as well 
as the emphasis on His passion and death 
were all, it is claimed, directed against this 
heresy. 

It would seem as though neither one of 
these two views could contain all the truth. 
The whole connection of the creed with Bap- 
tism seems to indicate a positive purpose. 
And that positive purpose is fundamentally 
connected with allegiance to Jesus Christ. 



ORIGIN AND CHARACTER 43 



That, in the expansion of that belief and in 
the outline of the gospel story in the creed, 
the positive development should also take ac- 
count of hostile views seems inevitable. And 
that some of the articles of the creed can best 
be explained through a polemic reference 
seems indubitable. We may therefore rea- 
sonably assume that while the underlying 
character of the creed was a positive expres- 
sion of faith in Christ, its development was 
also partly directed against views hostile to 
that faith. But the creed did not come into 
being for the rejection of false views, but for 
the expression of a positive faith. 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 



Ill 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 

WHY should we believe the Creed? Ar- 
ticle VIII, of the Thirty-Nine Articles 
of the Episcopal Church, declares that " The 
Nicene Creed, and that which is commonly 
called the Apostles' Creed, ought thoroughly 
to be received and believed: for they may 
be proved by most certain warrants of Holy 
Scripture." Behind the creed stands the 
Bible. The Episcopal Church, in common 
with the Church of England and with all 
Protestantism, takes the position that the 
final witness to Christian faith lies not in the 
creeds and not in the authority of the Church, 
but in the Bible. This position is of such 
importance and has so close a bearing on the 
place of the creed that it demands careful 
consideration. 



47 



48 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



I 

That the Church of England at the Refor- 
mation, closely followed in this respect by 
the Episcopal Church in America, fully ac- 
cepted the Protestant position of the su- 
premacy of Scripture can be clearly seen by a 
study of our sources. The Thirty-Nine Ar- 
ticles cannot be regarded as a final and suffi- 
cient statement of the Church's position, and 
no subscription to them has ever been re- 
quired in the American Episcopal Church. 
Nevertheless they are a valuable witness to 
the historical attitude of the Church, and 
especially of its attitude to the Bible. In 
this respect Article VIII just quoted only re- 
flects the position of Article VI, " Of the 
Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salva- 
tion," and of Article XX, " Of the Authority 
of the Church," which latter Article in reality 
limits the authority of the Church by that of 
Scripture. In the Articles of the English 
Church, Article XXI, " Of the Authority of 
General Councils," reads as follows: " Gen- 
eral Councils may not be gathered together 
without the commandment and will of princes. 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 49 



And when they be gathered together (for- 
asmuch as they be an assembly of men, 
whereof all be not governed with the spirit 
and word of God) they may err, and some- 
time have erred, even in things pertaining 
unto God. Wherefore things ordained by 
them as necessary to salvation have neither 
strength nor authority, unless it may be de- 
clared that they be taken out of Holy Scrip- 
ture." In the American Prayer Book the 
place of this Article is taken by the following 
note: " The Twenty-first of the former Ar- 
ticles is omitted; because it is partly of a local 
and civil nature, and is provided for, as to the 
remaining parts of it, in other Articles." 
The part that is " of a local and civil na- 
ture " is evidently that referring to " the 
commandment and will of princes," a refer- 
ence deemed inapplicable under a republican 
form of government. The " remaining parts 
of it," those dealing with the relation of the 
authority of the Church in Councils to the 
authority of Scripture, are evidently covered 
by the other Articles here referred to. It 
should also be noted that the two Books of 
Homilies, commended in Article XXXV as 



50 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



containing " a godly and wholesome Doc- 
trine, and necessary for these times," are full 
of the emphasis upon the supremacy of 
Scripture. 

This attitude is, of course, not confined to 
the Articles. It is clearly expressed in the 
services for Ordination. Priest and Bishop 
alike state their persuasion that the Holy 
Scriptures contain all doctrine required as 
necessary for eternal salvation through faith 
in Jesus Christ, and express their determina- 
tion to teach nothing, as necessary for eter- 
nal salvation, but that which they shall be 
persuaded may be concluded and proved by 
the Scripture. It is of especial significance 
that in its ordination services the Church of 
England deliberately did away with the as- 
sent to the theology of the creeds required 
in the Roman Church, and substituted for it 
the promise of conformity to Scripture. Not 
the creed but Scripture is made the basis for 
Christian faith. 1 

1 For a full discussion of this subject, and especially 
for the relation between the promise of conformity to 
Scripture and the promise " so to minister the Doctrine 
and Sacraments, and the Discipline of Christ, as the 
Lord hath commanded, and as this Church hath received 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 5 1 



II 

This position as to the supremacy of Scrip- 
ture seems to many persons to-day to be full 
of difficulties. It often seems to imply a me- 
chanical conception of the Bible, and to stand 
in the way of freedom of thought. A closer 
consideration, however, will show that these 
consequences do not follow. 

The vindication of this position lies in the 
essentially historic character of the Christian 
religion. Christianity is a religion with a 
historic Founder, Jesus Christ. And He is 
not only Founder of the religion, He is its 
object. Christianity is faith in Jesus Christ. 
It sees in Him the supreme revelation of God, 
and it finds in Him the source of the redeem- 
ing power of God in the world. 

Now it is always possible that Christian 
faith may tend to get away from faith in 
Jesus, and may substitute for that faith cer- 
tain theories about Him or certain ideas or 
ideals put in place of Him. But Christianity 

the same, according to the commandments of God" see 
A. V. G. Allen, Freedom in the Churchy Chap. III. Mac- 
millan, 1907. 



52 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



is not a mere set of ideals. It is the belief 
in Jesus, the belief that the living God is 
manifested as alone the living God can be 
manifested, in life. And the supreme mani- 
festation is in that Life which was the light 
of men, which St. John calls the Word. 
Jesus Christ is the Word of God, the mes- 
sage, the revelation, of God to the world. 
And just in so far as theories or ideas are 
untrue to Jesus Christ they are in the deepest 
sense not truly Christian. All truth that 
claims to be Christian must meet the test of 
the truth as it is in Jesus. 

It is sometimes said that historic facts 
can have no meaning or value for religion, 
that religion has to do with the present rela- 
tion to the living God, and not with the facts 
of a dead past. What happened in Palestine 
nearly two thousand years ago can make no 
difference to religion to-day. In answer it 
is to be said that of course religion deals 
with the present relation to the living God, 
and not with the facts of a dead past. But 
is there any dead past? Has the history of 
the past no relation to the living present? 
That depends on what we mean by history. 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 53 



If history be a mere set of dead facts without 
meaning or purpose, if human life be a thing 
without contact with the life of God, then in- 
deed history can have no religious value for 
us to-day. But if history be the current of 
human life, if God be in living contact with 
that human life, guiding it, manifesting Him- 
self in it, drawing it to Himself, then that 
history must be of essential value for the life 
with God. And if the supreme expression of 
God in history was in Jesus Christ, if in the 
fulness of time God was revealed in His Son, 
if through that gift a new life and a new 
power came to the world, then that history is 
of supreme importance to us to-day. And 
the historic Jesus belongs not to a dead past, 
but has opened up to us an eternal relation 
with the living God. 

The ideals of our country cannot be sepa- 
rated from its history, from the historic per- 
sons through whom those ideals were real- 
ised. Do away with that history, and the 
ideals become unreal and without power. In 
love for our country's ideals we rightly direct 
the reverence of our children to those men 
in whom those ideals became flesh. So it is 



54 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



supremely with the religious, with the Chris- 
tian, life. If religion be a thing apart from 
the world, then for it history can have no 
significance. But if God actually comes into 
contact with the life of men, then the history 
of man is of the deepest meaning for the life 
with God. And if God has supremely mani- 
fested Himself in His Son, if the Word of 
God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, then 
the life of that incarnate Word becomes a 
life of eternal significance and value. 

This result brings us directly to the value 
of Scripture for Christian faith. For it is in 
the Bible, essentially, of course, in the New 
Testament, that we find our sources for the 
knowledge of Christ and of the effect that He 
produced on the life of the world. And as 
the New Testament cannot be understood 
without the Old Testament, with which it 
stands in such close contact, the Old Testa- 
ment also, although in a subordinate degree, 
is essential for the understanding of the his- 
toric Christ. If Christian faith is to be truly 
Christian, if it is to be true to Christ, then it 
must constantly go back to the Bible. This is 
the essential basis for the position of our 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 55 



Church as to the supremacy of Scripture, for 
its teaching that " Holy Scripture containeth 
all things necessary to salvation." If the 
Church is to be true to Christ, then it must be 
true to Scripture, which is the oldest source of 
our knowledge of Christ. 

It is sometimes said that the Church is 
older than the Bible, or more specifically 
that the Christian Church is older than the 
New Testament, and therefore is of superior 
authority. But this statement, while true in 
form, is misleading in contents. The Church 
is older than the New Testament. Query: 
What Church is older than the New Testa- 
ment? Answer: The early Church, the 
Church of a part of the first century. Query : 
What do we know about that early Church? 
Answer: What we find in the New Testa- 
ment! That is virtually all that we know 
about it ; that is to say, the mass of our knowl- 
edge of it is derived from the New Testa- 
ment itself. Thus the appeal to the early 
Church as our supreme authority for the 
knowledge of Christ and of the interpretation 
of Him by His followers is nothing else than 
an appeal to the New Testament. The po- 



56 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



sition is not affected that the later Church 
must itself find in the New Testament its con- 
stant source of the truth as it is in Jesus. 

Of course this appeal to Scripture does not 
mean that there is to be no theological ad- 
vance. The theology of each age has its 
own task, and that task is to express truth 
in the terms of its own thought and to apply 
it to its own problems. And if we believe 
the promise that the Spirit is to guide us into 
all the truth, then we must believe that the 
Church shall with the ages advance into an 
ever new and deeper interpretation of Jesus 
Christ. But that interpretation, if it is to be 
really Christian, must be the interpretation of 
Jesus Christ Himself, and not of some sub- 
stitute for Him. It must not substitute for 
Jesus some merely ideal figure or some theory 
about Him. The Church in all its theologi- 
cal advance must keep that advance true to 
the mind of Christ, true to the Spirit of Jesus. 
Hence the Church must continually turn back 
to the Bible as the constant and unrepeatable 
source of its knowledge of Christ. 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 57 



III 

The supposition that this attitude towards 
the Bible is hostile to freedom of thought, or 
that it implies a mechanical theory of inspira- 
tion, rests upon a confusion. It confuses the 
authority of the Bible with the authority of 
a special theory of inspiration put upon the 
Bible and not drawn from the Bible itself. 
The theory of infallible inspiration has cer- 
tainly opposed freedom of thought. It has 
hindered the advance of science, as in the 
" conflict between Genesis and geology," it 
has stood in the way of honest criticism, and 
has thus interfered with a true knowledge of 
the Bible itself. But such a theory of infalli- 
bility has not been drawn from the Bible. It 
has been put upon the Bible from outside. 
Although not formally set forth as such, yet 
it is, practically and in the objectionable sense 
of the word, a " dogma," a theory resting 
on mere ecclesiastical authority, as the infalli- 
bility of the Pope is a dogma resting on mere 
ecclesiastical authority. The impediment to 
freedom has not been in Scripture itself, but 
in the subordination of Scripture to a theory, 



58 THE APOSTLES , CREED TO-DAY 



to the ecclesiastical dogma of an infallible or 
mechanical inspiration. 

Here has been the inconsistency of Protes- 
tantism. Recoiling from the authority of 
the Church, it found freedom in the authority 
of the Bible as it revealed Jesus Christ. 
And then, as though fearing to trust this 
source, it fell back on the theory of infalli- 
bility and proceeded to regard the Bible in 
the light of this theory. Such a procedure 
is natural enough to Roman Catholicism, 
which upholds the infallibility of the Church 
and its supremacy over Scripture. It is un- 
natural for Protestantism, which maintains 
that the authority of the Church must be lim- 
ited by Scripture. Yet Protestantism was 
unwilling to let Scripture tell its own story un- 
hampered by tradition! Scripture itself as 
the source to us of Christian truth has never 
been hostile to freedom of thought. But the 
theory of an infallible book has been just as 
much of a hindrance as has been the theory 
of an infallible Church. Both theories rest 
only on ecclesiastical authority. Neither one 
has anything to do with the true authority of 
Holy Scripture. The theory of an infallible 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 59 



Bible still rules substantially untouched to- 
day in the Church of Rome. Protestantism 
is already throwing off the yoke which it is no 
longer able to bear. 

It follows that any theory of inspiration 
ought to be drawn from the Bible itself, and 
not to be superimposed upon it from outside. 
Devotion to the Bible demands that we should 
let it shine by its own light. We are to study 
it for what it is, and not in the light of a 
theory that hinders us from discovering its 
true nature. 

It follows that the position of the su- 
premacy of Scripture not only permits but 
demands Biblical criticism. The word criti- 
cism has an unfortunate sound. Popularly 
it means to judge unfavourably. Of course 
no such meaning belongs to it as it is applied 
to the study of the Bible. The word itself 
means simply to judge or estimate. And if 
we are to understand the Bible, criticism in 
that sense is absolutely necessary. We must 
try to understand the Bible as it is. 

In such an attempt two things are neces- 
sary. We must first seek by study and com- 
parison of documents to find out what is the 



6o THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



actual text of the Bible. This is known as 
" textual " or as the " lower " criticism. 
The second attempt is to study the Bible as 
history, to get at its sources, to estimate the 
age of its various parts, to discuss questions 
of authorship, and to obtain a clear idea of 
the historical events of which the Bible is our 
witness. This is " historical " or the 
"higher" criticism. The word "higher" 
carries no claim to infallibility and makes no 
assumption of superiority. And the results 
of higher criticism are not necessarily radical 
or destructive in character. Any man is a 
" higher critic," good or bad, who studies the 
Bible in its historical setting. Without such 
criticism the Bible itself cannot be under- 
stood. 1 

The creed is, then, the product of the 
Church, and is the expression of the Church's 
belief in and loyalty to Jesus Christ. It does 
not stand by itself alone, nor is it to be ac- 
cepted merely on the authority of the Church. 
The final test of the creed is Christ Himself. 

1 See H. S. Nash, The History of the Higher Criticism 
of the New Testament, being the History of the Process 
whereby the Word of God has won the Right to be 
Understood. Macmillan, 1900. 



THE CREED AND THE BIBLE 61 



Therefore the creed must find its verification 
in the Scriptures, which are the oldest source 
of our knowledge of Christ. Behind the 
creed stands the Bible. 

We have discussed the origin and character 
of the Apostles' Creed, and its relation to the 
Bible. That discussion should cast light on 
the interpretation and use of the creed to-day. 



THE INTERPRETATION OF 
THE APOSTLES' CREED 
TO-DAY 



IV 



THE INTERPRETATION OF THE APOSTLES' 
CREED TO-DAY 

/^ERTAIN considerations resulting from 
our previous study will serve to give a 
background to the subject of this chapter. 
And first among these considerations is the 
fact that the creed is fundamentally an ex- 
pression of loyalty to Jesus Christ. The 
word " belief n or " faith,'' as previously 
suggested, 1 has two meanings, personal and 
intellectual, belief in and belief that. The 
personal meaning is an expression of trust or 
confidence in a person. The intellectual 
meaning is an expression of a conviction that 
certain facts or statements are true. The 
former denotes a living faith, the latter an 
intellectual conviction. 

1 See above, p. 18. 



65 



66 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



I 

Of these two elements the former is reli- 
giously by far the more important. If men 
are saved by faith, that faith must express 
a living confidence or trust, and not a mere 
orthodoxy of belief. It is in the latter sense 
that St. James says that " the devils also be- 
lieve, and shudder." 1 No salvation comes 
out of mere accuracy of views. And the 
creed has its importance for Christian life not 
because it expresses accuracy of theological 
statement, but because it expresses a living 
faith in Jesus Christ and in the revelation of 
God that comes through Him. To approach 
the creed from the point of view of consider- 
ing it merely or primarily a matter of intellec- 
tual statement is radically to misinterpret the 
historic character of the creed and radically 
to misunderstand its value for us to-day. 

Yet these two elements, personal and intel- 
lectual, cannot altogether be separated. A 
personal faith demands and carries with it in- 
tellectual contents. A child who believes in 
his mother also believes that his mother is 

1 James 2: 19. 



INTERPRETATION 67 



worthy of his trust. This conviction may 
not be expressed in any explicit form, but it 
is implicit in the very act of trust itself. If 
in the development of the child he is forced 
to believe that his mother is unworthy of his 
trust, then that trust will be shaken at its 
foundation. So it is with belief in God and 
in Christ. The personal trust must carry 
with it such intellectual elements as shall 
make that trust possible. Thus the creed, 
while fundamentally expressing allegiance or 
loyalty, yet carries with it such intellectual 
statements or convictions as that loyalty de- 
mands. 

It is in regard to the second of these two 
elements that there is any problem as to the 
interpretation of the creed to-day, any prob- 
lem of honesty as to its meaning for the 
modern man. We must therefore not shirk 
the intellectual side. But we must remem- 
ber that it is secondary to and expressive of 
a personal contents. Its value is not for it- 
self, but for the living personal faith that it 
enshrines and guards. 

In the second place, it is to be remembered 
that the creed is essentially one. It is not a 



68 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



set of disconnected propositions without any 
inward relation to each other. Part of the 
difficulty in regard to the acceptance of spe- 
cial clauses comes from a disregard of this 
connection, from taking a clause as though 
it stood all by itself, a mere isolated frag- 
ment. And while the difficulty is not neces- 
sarily removed by considering its relation to 
the oneness of the creed, yet at any rate we 
get a better sense of proportion if that one- 
ness is kept in view. And a sense of propor- 
tion has much value. 

In the third place, the creed is a corporate 
rather than an individual product. We saw 
in the first chapter that a creed as such is an 
expression of truth which is felt to be vitally 
connected with religious fellowship. 1 And 
the Apostles' Creed is the outcome of an ex- 
perience that is greater than that of any indi- 
vidual, the experience of a corporate fellow- 
ship in Christ. An individual Christian may 
very properly approach the creed with the 
conviction that it carries with it elements of a 
religious and Christian experience that may 

1 It may be noted that the original form of the Nicene 
Creed began " We believe." 



INTERPRETATION 69 



go beyond his own capacity to assimilate. 

What is here suggested is not an arbitrary 
or unmoral or unscientific leap in the dark, 
an acceptance of statements on the mere 
basis of an external authority. Such an act 
is immoral. What is suggested is that the 
individual in religious and Christian matters, 
as well as in scientific or political matters, 
may well take account of an experience that is 
wider than his own. In scientific and in po- 
litical matters we constantly live in reliance 
on such a wider experience. May not the 
individual Christian, expressing his loyalty to 
Christ and to the fellowship that comes from 
Him, naturally expect to find in the creed 
which is the outcome of that fellowship, ele- 
ments that may go beyond his own experi- 
ence? 

Such a consideration by no means sets 
aside difficulties as to the individual's accept- 
ing statements in the creed concerning which 
he is in doubt. But it does again suggest a 
sense of proportion, in connection with which 
such difficulties may well be considered. Are 
they difficulties that strike at the root of the 
allegiance to Christ? Then they must be re- 



7 o THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



moved before the creed can be accepted. Or 
are they difficulties that concern only minor 
points, not vitally affecting the great cor- 
porate contents of the creed? In that case 
they may at least be regarded with the sense 
of proportion that comes from the recogni- 
tion that that corporate experience is greater 
than the experience of the individual. And 
again a sense of proportion has much value. 

In the fourth place, the creed is not an ab- 
solute finality. It cannot claim to be a com- 
pletely final or sufficient statement of Chris- 
tian truth. This fact is evident for two rea- 
sons. 

First, the Apostles' Creed is itself a growth, 
and a growth that is the outcome of the 
Church's experience and the Church's needs. 
It did not spring into being all at once, but it 
is the result of a long process of development. 
It is the product of the Church's life. And 
the Church is still the living Church. It did 
not cease to live when the Apostles' Creed 
reached its completed form at some obscure 
period in about the sixth century. The creed 
was made for the Church, and not the Church 
for the creed. 



INTERPRETATION 



Secondly, as discussed in the last chapter, 
behind the creed stands the Bible. The 
Bible, not the creed, is the source of our 
knowledge of Christ. Every article of the 
creed must stand or fall by the test of Scrip- 
ture. 

These four considerations, that the creed 
is primarily an expression of allegiance to 
Jesus Christ, that the creed is a whole, and 
not a set of disconnected propositions, that 
the creed is a corporate rather than a merely 
individual utterance, and that the creed is not 
an absolute finality, but is the product of a 
long development and goes back to Scripture 
for its verification, these four considerations 
should form a background for the discussion 
as to the meaning and interpretation of the 
creed to-day. 

II 

In the second chapter it was seen that the 
Apostles' Creed in its development embraced 
two elements, positive and polemic. The 
positive element concerned faith in Jesus 
Christ. The polemic element concerned the 
rejection of various views that were hostile 



72 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



to that faith. Substantially these same two 
elements may now be expressed for us as per- 
manent and progressive. The relation be- 
tween these two brings us to the heart of the 
question as to our interpretation of the creed. 

The permanent element in the creed is be- 
lief in Jesus Christ and in the revelation of 
God that comes through Him. For belief 
in Jesus carries for us, as it did for the early 
Church in its baptismal symbol, belief in the 
Father whom He revealed, and in the Holy 
Spirit, who through Him found new expres- 
sion in the life of man. The Church Cate- 
chism well sums up the meaning of the creed: 
" What dost thou chiefly learn in these Arti- 
cles of thy Belief? " 

" First, I learn to believe in God the Fa- 
ther, who hath made me, and all the world. 

" Secondly, in God the Son, who hath re- 
deemed me, and all mankind. 

" Thirdly, in God the Holy Ghost, who 
sanctifieth me, and all the people of God." 

It may be correctly said that the essence 
of the creed is belief in the Trinity. But be- 
lief in the Trinity is too often regarded as a 
mere abstract belief, as a set of doctrines 



INTERPRETATION 



more or less difficult of apprehension, and 
more or less remote from human life. It is 
therefore better and more true to the actual 
history of the creed to say that the essence 
of the creed is belief in Jesus Christ. It is 
out of that belief that there arose belief in the 
Trinity, which latter is therefore no abstract 
belief, but is in its essence belief in Jesus 
Christ, through whom the Father is revealed, 
in whom the redeeming love of God is ex- 
perienced, through whom the presence of 
God's Holy Spirit becomes a power in the 
hearts of believers and in the corporate life 
of the Church. 

Loyalty to the creed demands loyalty to 
Jesus Christ. He who believes in Jesus 
Christ, who finds God in Him, and who gives 
to Him his allegiance, he believes in the very 
heart of the creed. He who with that be- 
lief takes the creed upon his lips, says it with 
the same meaning with which it was said at 
Baptism in the early Church. 

All departures from this meaning are de- 
partures from the historic meaning of the 
creed. To make the creed stand for a mere 
set of religious or Christian ideas and not 



74 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



for loyalty to the historic Jesus is to depart 
from the original basis of the creed. 

We have seen that the creed was partly 
directed against Gnosticism. And Gnosti- 
cism saw in the Christian faith a collection of 
ideas rather than the actual presence of God 
realised in history. It conceived of God as 
far removed from the world and therefore 
incapable of being incarnate in a historic per- 
son. It therefore depreciated the historical 
reality of the life of Christ and His actual 
contact with the world. Opposed to all this, 
the creed asserts the historical reality of the 
life of Jesus, and emphasises the fact that 
Christian faith is faith in this Jesus who was 
born of the Virgin Mary and crucified under 
Pontius Pilate. The historic element lay in 
the very centre of the early creed. 

There is a modern Gnosticism which tends 
to reduce Christianity to a set of abstract 
ideas as to the relation between God and men, 
and makes the creed only a symbol of such 
ideas. It tends to take the historic element 
out of Christian faith. But the creed, as re- 
lated to early Baptism and to the faith of the 
New Testament, stands for belief in the his- 



INTERPRETATION 



toric Jesus. To interpret the creed as having 
merely a mystical or ideal contents, is to de- 
part from its original meaning. 

Loyalty to the creed implies above every- 
thing else loyalty to Jesus Christ. The rest 
of the creed is the outcome and expression of 
that loyalty. In that loyalty we have the 
permanent element of the creed. 

Ill 

We turn now to the progressive elements, 
by which this loyalty was defined, as further 
definition and defence became necessary. 
Such progressive elements are necessary for 
any faith that is to be a permanent one. 
Permanent and progressive are not opposed 
terms. A faith can be permanent only if it 
is capable of meeting new issues. It must be 
a living faith if it is to endure. A religion 
dies when it can no longer meet the problems 
and come into contact with the ideas of a 
new world. The permanent is conserved ex- 
actly by its capacity for progress. If the 
faith in Christ is to be a lasting faith, it can 
be so only because, as new ideas and new 
problems emerge, it has capacity to express 



7 6 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



itself in regard to these new elements. Per- 
manence is not ossification, it is life. And 
life is progress. 

In every time of progress the old truth 
must then find a new expression, otherwise 
the old truth will itself be lost. But now 
comes the important point. Every such new 
expression must itself find new interpretation 
as time goes on. The task of theology in 
any age is to express truth in terms of that 
age, not of a former age and not of a later 
one. In every succeeding period, theology 
must repeat the same task. It must take the 
old expression, and continually give it new 
interpretation. Simply to abide by the old 
formula is to forfeit the very truth that that 
formula was intended to express. As it ex- 
pressed truth for its time, so must a later 
age carry on the same task. 

So thought the men who formed the Ni- 
cene Creed. The most important issue at the 
Council of Nicaea concerned the word 
homoousion, " of one substance." Should it 
be declared that the Son was of one substance 
with the Father, or only of like substance, or 



INTERPRETATION 



of different substance? We can now see 
clearly enough that on the controversy about 
that word depended the issues of the Chris- 
tian faith. Was Christ really the Redeemer, 
uplifting men into the very life of God? 
Was He really the Word made flesh? Or 
was He only one more to be added to the 
demigods of the heathen world? In the 
terms of that time, the word homoousion 
carried with it the issue between Christianity 
and heathenism. 

It is interesting to see the attitude taken 
toward this word. The Arians objected to 
it because it was new. It was not in the Bible, 
and they would hold to the old truth and to 
the old expression. The followers of Atha- 
nasius maintained that they themselves were 
the ones who stood by the old truth. But 
they felt that that old truth could be retained 
only by a new expression. They dared to 
express the faith in a new form, because only 
in that new form could the old faith be main- 
tained. The Arians held by a permanence 
of the letter, the Athanasians by a perma- 
nence of the spirit. The word homoousion 



7 8 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



was a word of progress. It claimed that the 
old faith had a right to enter into possession 
of a new world. 

This discussion should cast light on our at- 
titude to-day toward this same word in the 
Nicene Creed. We do not naturally think 
of God as a " substance." We think of Him 
rather as a living and loving Will. We 
think in terms of character, we use ethical 
concepts rather than those of substance. 
And in this respect we come nearer to New 
Testament thought than we do to the Greek 
terms of thinking in which this creed is ex- 
pressed. What then should be our attitude 
toward the phrase " of one substance with the 
Father "? Should we reject it as belonging 
to an outworn metaphysics? Should we not 
rather maintain that we ourselves are, in our 
thought of Christ, trying to do for the twen- 
tieth century the same thing that Athanasius 
did for the fourth century? In so doing we 
accept cordially his results, and at the same 
time go on to give them new expression for 
our new time. Therein we are true to the 
past, for we are reproducing the same pro- 
cedure in the living present. 



INTERPRETATION 



This example from the Nicene Creed casts 
light on our interpretation of those clauses 
in the Apostles' Creed which deal with pro- 
gressive or polemic elements. Have we a 
right to interpret those clauses in the light of 
modern thought ? What constitutes loyalty to 
the creed? What is an honest uttering of 
such clauses? 

In the first place, we must remember, as 
before suggested, that the creed is one. It 
stands for loyalty to Jesus Christ and to the 
revelation of God through Him. The spe- 
cial clauses must be interpreted as defending 
that supreme allegiance which the creed 
guards. 

Secondly, it must be remembered that a 
change or development in the interpretation 
of special clauses is absolutely necessary if 
their original truth is to be maintained and 
preserved. There should be no half-hearted, 
apologetic attitude toward such a need of in- 
terpretation. It is not a departure from loy- 
alty, but the demand of loyalty. 

In the third place, the supreme test is this: 
Does the language of the creed express for its 
own time the same truth in which we our- 



8o THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



selves believe? If so, then we have every 
right to claim that language for ourselves, 
and to claim it not in any evasive way but as 
our absolute privilege and right. Thereby 
we are putting ourselves in line with those 
who made the creed, in line with all those who 
held or hold allegiance to Jesus Christ. 

Apply this test to the example just taken 
from the Nicene Creed. In regard to the 
word homoousion a man has every right to 
ask himself, " Had I been at Nicaea, do I 
trust that by God's grace I should have had 
courage to stand where Athanasius stood? 
Then I claim this word homoousion as my 
own, and I claim the right to translate it into 
the terms that express the same truth for our 
own times. And in so doing I claim, with 
humility but with boldness, that I stand with 
those who defended the faith then, and with 
those who are prepared to defend it now." 

IV 

Let us now turn to some of the specific 
clauses of the Apostles' Creed, and see how 
these principles apply in their interpretation. 



INTERPRETATION 8 1 



The phrase " Maker of heaven and earth " 
is of late date in the formation of the creed. 
If it had appeared early we should doubtless 
take it to be in opposition to Gnosticism, 
which held that creation was the work of an 
inferior deity. But with its late date it is dif- 
ficult to discover any special polemic motive. 
Probably it is simply a positive expression of 
the Christian belief in creation, a belief held 
to be of great importance in the whole early 
Church. But in any case the phrase suggests 
the creation narrative in the first chapter of 
Genesis. That was doubtless its original 
sense, and it has been taken in that sense until 
very recent times. In Archbishop Usher's 
chronology, creation is definitely dated at 
4004 B. c, and that it took place in six days 
of twenty-four hours each was an accepted be- 
lief. Now that the doctrine of evolution is 
universally accepted we have been forced to a 
new interpretation. We recognise that di- 
vine creatorship is not incompatible with a 
process occupying millions of years. Yet in 
our easy-going acceptance of that theory, we 
may easily forget how recent and how severe 
was the struggle to allow such an interpreta- 



82 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 

tion as consistent with Christian belief. It is 
not much more than half a century since Dar- 
winism took the field, and even now there are 
heard the occasional shots of ultra-orthodox 
skirmishers who have not happened to hear 
that the battle is over. The completeness of 
the victory is instructive. Our fathers found 
it very hard to reconcile the new interpreta- 
tion with Christian faith. Yet to-day few in- 
telligent persons will question the loyalty of 
a believer in evolution who accepts this article 
of the creed. 

" He descended into hell " is another 
article of somewhat late date in the Apostles' 
Creed. We do not know its original pur- 
pose. It may have been intended to teach 
the reality of the death of Jesus, or to indi- 
cate that He preached to the spirits in prison. 1 
The word " hell " has generally been taken 
as meaning the abode of the dead, Hades, 
rather than the place of punishment. In 
the American Episcopal Church the omis- 
sion of the clause was allowed until the re- 
vision of 1892, and now there may be substi- 
tuted for it the words " He went into the 

1 1 Peter 3 : 19. 



INTERPRETATION 83 



place of departed spirits." Thus the mean- 
ing of the phrase has long been controverted. 
But in any case the original thought was that 
of an abode for the dead somewhere below 
the earth. As that spatial conception has 
disappeared we give the words a more spirit- 
ual interpretation. Again, few would to- 
day be found to question the loyalty of such a 
re-interpretation. 

The phrase " He ascended into heaven " 
belonged to the early creed, and it is quite 
probable that it carried no especial polemic 
interest. It suggests the general outline of 
the gospel story of Jesus, and the universal 
belief that after the Resurrection He had 
been exalted into full fellowship with the 
Father. Yet we plainly give the words a new 
interpretation. As originally conceived, the 
earth was a plane, and heaven was a place ex- 
isting above the earth. With the Copernican 
theory such a spatial conception became im- 
possible. The language of the creed is seen 
to be symbolic. The word symbolic does not 
at all imply that the language is not true. 
But it does imply that, if the truth is made 
identical with the form in which it is con- 



84 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



veyed, then the truth will be lost as the form 
changes. 

This symbolic character is seen in the next 
clause, " And sitteth on the right hand of God 
the Father Almighty." The right hand de- 
notes the position of supreme dignity and 
honour, 1 and this is of course its meaning in 
the creed. The symbolic character of the 
language is strikingly brought out by the mod- 
ern translation of the creed into Chinese. In 
China the left hand is the position of honour 
and dignity, and the right hand is the position 
of subordination. It has therefore become 
necessary to explain that when the right hand 
of God is mentioned it is really the left hand 
that is meant! It might seem as though 
greater boldness in translation would have 
furthered the cause of accuracy, and that it 
might have been better to translate " on the 
left hand of God." But in any case the ex- 
ample is a striking one as to the need of new 
interpretations if the old meaning is to be 
preserved. Bondage to the letter is some- 
times denial of the truth. 

This constant need of re-interpretation is 

1 See Acts 7: 55-6. 



INTERPRETATION 



clearly seen in the next clause, " From thence 
he shall come to judge the quick and the 
dead." This clause is found in the earliest 
creed, which therein reflects the thought of 
the New Testament. Fundamental to the 
New Testament is the expectation of the 
speedy return of Christ for judgment, and 
this expectation was expressed in the strongly 
realistic terms of cotemporary Judaism. It 
is natural that this belief should have been 
incorporated into the early creed. 

Now it seems hardly possible to-day to 
accept this belief in its original form. That 
expectation of the immediate coming of 
Christ was not fulfilled. And even if we 
hold that the immediacy of the coming was 
not an essential part of the belief, yet we can 
hardly expect the second coming of Christ to 
take place at some future time in the realistic 
form presented in the New Testament and 
implied in the creed. Probably the major- 
ity of intelligent Christians will hold that in 
interpreting the second coming as a process 
rather than a single event, in looking for a 
divine judgment on the affairs of men, and 
in trusting to the future coming of the king- 



86 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



dom of Christ, they are loyal to the truth of 
the creed. A new interpretation is the only 
way in which the old truth can be conserved. 

The clause, " The Resurrection of the 
flesh," has in the Prayer Book translation 
been softened into " The Resurrection of the 
body," although in the present Prayer Book 
the original phrase has been retained in the 
interrogative form of the creed in the Office 
for the Visitation of the Sick. This clause 
was clearly directed against Gnosticism, which 
held that the flesh is essentially unclean. This 
idea showed itself in two apparently con- 
trasted yet closely related forms, in asceticism 
and in sensuality. Asceticism tried to win 
spiritual life by an abuse of the body. Or 
again it was held that the truly perfected man, 
the spiritual man, could indulge in any fleshly 
pleasure, however impure, without injuring 
his spirit. As opposed to this, the Christian 
thought demanded holiness in this life as well 
as in the life to come. And it emphasised the 
relation between the two by declaring that 
in the coming kingdom the resurrection should 
be that of this same body of flesh. The 
clause, " the Resurrection of the flesh," ex- 



INTERPRETATION 87 



pressed the healthy-mindedness of the Chris- 
tian attitude to life. 

Even with this good purpose, this clause 
had from the beginning to contend with St. 
Paul's thought as expressed in the fifteenth 
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinth- 
ians. Here St. Paul maintains that the resur- 
rection is not of the natural body but of the 
spiritual body, " that flesh and blood cannot 
inherit the kingdom of God." The resur- 
rection of the flesh had to undergo a liberal 
interpretation if it was to agree with St. Paul. 
Yet even so it was for many years contended 
that at the resurrection the particles of the 
present body of flesh should in some mysteri- 
ous way be brought together to form the 
body of the resurrection. We have out- 
grown this carnal conception. By the resur- 
rection of the body we mean that after death 
we shall find a new and personal expression 
in some environment that is now unknown to 
us. Again we can see clearly the need of 
some such new interpretation if the essential 
meaning of the creed is to be retained. This 
new interpretation has been made easier by 
the wise translation of the word " flesh," by 



88 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



the word " body." But the fact of this trans- 
lation only makes more evident the need of 
the new interpretaticni. 

In regard to the examples already selected 
from the creed there would probably be little 
controversy to-day. They have been se- 
lected not because they involve doubtful in- 
terpretation, but because they involve prin- 
ciples of interpretation which should cast 
light on more controverted points. The two 
clauses of the creed which are now the sub- 
ject of special controversy are doubtless the 
clauses, " Born of the Virgin Mary," and, 
" The third day he rose again from the 
dead." We proceed to the consideration of 
these. 

v 

The belief in the Virgin Birth presents to- 
day many difficulties, and no good can come 
from ignoring them, or from failing to recog- 
nise their force. It is greatly to be wished 
that discussion of the subject should be free 
from acrimony and from charges either of 
disloyalty or obscurantism. Only by such 
discussion, in a reverent and Christian spirit, 



INTERPRETATION 89 



can the real issues be made clear and the real 
values be appreciated. 

It is not necessary here to do more than in 
the briefest way to state the question as to 
the evidence in the New Testament. The 
Virgin Birth is mentioned only in the narra- 
tives found in the early chapters of St. Mat- 
thew and St. Luke. These narratives are 
not a part of the original source from which 
our first three Gospels are derived, 1 but they 
are of early origin. There is no question of 
textual criticism involved. These narratives 
unquestionably belong to the Gospels of St. 
Matthew and St. Luke as we have them. 

Aside from these passages the Virgin 
Birth is not mentioned in the New Testa- 
ment. 2 Neither St. Paul, nor the author of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews nor St. John gives 
any evidence of having heard of it, 3 although 
it is these writers who most exalt the Person 

1 See p. 33. 

2 There may possibly be a reference to it in Mark 6 : 3, 
which speaks of Jesus as "the carpenter, the son of 
Mary," in contrast with Matt. 13:55, which speaks of 
Him as " the carpenter's son." 

3 Passages like Rom. 1:3-4, Gal. 4:4 and John 7:41-2, 
while of course entirely compatible with a knowledge of 
the Virgin Birth, furnish no evidence of such knowledge. 



9 o THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



of Christ, and in whom the belief in the In- 
carnation finds its strongest expression. 

It is also claimed that there are evi- 
dences here and there in the New Testament 
of a tradition in accordance with which Jesus 
was regarded as the son of Joseph and Mary. 
The genealogies in the first chapter of St. 
Matthew and in the third chapter of St. 
Luke, which trace the ancestry of Joseph, and 
the passages in the Gospels which refer to 
Joseph as the father of Jesus, 1 are claimed 
as such evidence. In reply it is maintained 
that the latter passages are only modes of 
speech not to be pressed to verbal accuracy, 
and that the genealogies naturally deal with 
the family with which Mary was joined by 
marriage, and in which Jesus would legally 
be reckoned. The words " being the son 
(as was supposed) of Joseph" 2 are, of 
course, pointed out in this connection. 

In general it must be confessed that the 
New Testament evidence for the Virgin 
Birth is extremely slight in comparison, for 
example, with that for the Resurrection or 

1 Matt. 13:55, Luke 2:48, 4:22, John 1:45, 6:42. 
2 Luke 3 : 23. 



INTERPRETATION 



for the belief in the Incarnation. It should, 
however, for the sake of fairness, be borne in 
mind that the reliability of the evidence for 
the fact of the Virgin Birth is not necessarily 
dependent on the accuracy of all the details of 
the narratives in which that evidence is con- 
tained. The presence of legendary elements, 
such as the detailed accounts of the angelic 
appearances, may be recognised without 
thereby overthrowing the evidence for the 
Virgin Birth itself. 1 

In dealing with this subject it is well to 
consider first the religious or spiritual mean- 
ing of these narratives. If we find that 
meaning to be in accord with the general view 
of Christ that is to be found in the New Tes- 
tament, and that is of essential value to Chris- 
tian faith, we shall naturally approach the 
question of the Virgin Birth with a more fa- 
vourable attitude than we should if such a 
meaning were not to be found. 

In turning then to consider the meaning 
of these narratives it is well to get rid of one 

1 This distinction is made by Bishop Gore, Dissertations 
on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation, pp. 21-2, 
and by G. H. Box, The Virgin Birth of Jesus, pp. 185-6, 
quoting from Bishop Gore. 



92 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



objection to them which to many persons 
seems a serious stumbling block. It is some- 
times thought that these stories embody the 
idea that there is something essentially evil 
in marriage. They are supposed to express 
the exaltation of celibacy, and therefore to be 
a reflection on the sacred character of the 
marriage bond. If this objection were well 
taken it would indeed be difficult to find any 
moral or religious defence of the Virgin 
Birth. The exaltation of celibacy and con- 
sequent degradation of marriage have done 
incalculable injury to Christian ideals. And 
in these days, when the problem of the fam- 
ily is in the forefront of social problems, any 
undermining of the sacredness of marriage 
must be viewed with deep suspicion. 

It seems, however, quite clear that no such 
idea or motive underlies these narratives. 
For they are the most Hebraic part of the 
New Testament. Not, of course, that the 
idea of a supernatural birth is especially a 
Hebrew idea. That is common enough in 
other religious thought. What is meant is 
that these passages are early in date, and 
that in their whole structure and form they 



INTERPRETATION 



are overwhelmingly Hebraic. They are dis- 
tinctly a Hebrew rather than a Greek prod- 
uct. But the exaltation of celibacy and deg- 
radation of marriage was a Greek and not 
a Hebrew idea. The Hebrew exalted mar- 
riage. When the putting of marriage on a 
lower plane began to affect disastrously the 
ideals of the early Church, this effect was 
due to the influence of Greek ideas. To 
suppose that these narratives, the most He- 
brew part of the New Testament, result from 
or embody such an anti-Hebraic conception 
is to contradict the facts. It would seem 
then that this objection may be definitely set 
aside. 

For somewhat similar reasons it does not 
seem that these narratives are due to the 
belief in the sinlessness of our Lord, or that 
they especially embody that thought. There 
is no evidence that such a motive entered into 
the original stories. And to suppose that 
the sinlessness of Jesus is vitally connected 
with the Virgin Birth is again to run the risk 
of supposing that marriage involves some- 
thing of a sinful taint. 

The inward religious or theological con- 



94 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



tent of these narratives lies rather in the con- 
viction, common to the whole Christian com- 
munity, that Jesus could not be explained in 
human terms alone, but that He must be re- 
garded as the direct gift of God to the world. 
This idea in one form or another underlies 
the whole New Testament. While in the 
first three Gospels there is little theoretical 
interpretation, yet they see in Jesus, to say 
the very least, One who cannot be measured 
by any of the ordinary standards of human 
life. 1 St. Paul finds in Jesus the second 
Adam, the new beginning of the race, the 
pre-existent Son, who is before all things, 
and in whom all things consist. 2 The writer 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews exalts Jesus 
above all angels, and believes Him the active 
instrument of God in creation. 3 St. John 

1 Passages are too numerous to quote fully. It is not 
so much a question of special texts as of the general 
attitude toward Jesus. The following references may 
serve as examples: Matt. 3:17, Mark 1:11, Luke 3:22, 
Matt. 9:2-8, Mark 2:6-10, Luke 5:21-24, Matt. 11:27, 
Luke 10:22, Matt. 14:33, 16:27, 17:5, Mark 9:7, Luke 
9:35, Matt. 22:45, Mark 12:37, Luke 20:44, Matt. 26:64, 
Mark 14:62, Luke 22:69-71, Matt. 28:17. 

2 See, e. g. I Cor. 15:47, Phil. 2:6-11, Col. 1:15-19. 
3 Heb. Chap. 1. 



INTERPRETATION 



sees in Him the Incarnation of the eternal 
Word of God. 1 Everywhere Jesus is re- 
garded as surpassing all human standards, 
and as being the direct gift of God to the 
world. 

Now the accounts of the Virgin Birth seem 
in their religious contents to express this 
same conviction about our Lord. Jesus can- 
not be explained in human terms alone. He 
is not the mere product of human develop- 
ment. He can be accounted for only by the 
direct creative act of God. Such seems to be 
the essential idea that these narratives ex- 
press. 

Such a conviction belongs essentially to 
faith in Jesus. If He be the mere product 
of the race, then He is not the Redeemer and 
Saviour of the race. Christian faith sees in 
Jesus the new creation of God, the new start- 
ing point of humanity. He is not only the 
Son of man but the Son of God. 

Of course this belief can be held without 
its being expressed in the form of the Virgin 
Birth. So far as we can see, it was so held 
by St. Paul, by the author of the Epistle to 

1 John i * i— 1 8, 6 : 62, 8 : 23, 42, 58, 20 : 28, I John 1 : 1-2. 



9 6 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



the Hebrews, by St. John. It would be going 
far beyond what is written to identify this 
belief with belief in the Virgin Birth, or to 
make the former belief dependent upon the 
latter. Nevertheless, if we are looking for 
an inward theological or religious meaning 
for the narratives of the Virgin Birth, it 
would seem that that meaning is one common 
to the whole New Testament and fundamen- 
tal to belief in Jesus. 

When we turn from the story of the Virgin 
Birth in the New Testament to the purpose 
of its introduction into the creed we are on 
uncertain ground. It has been strongly con- 
tended 1 that this clause was for an anti- 
Gnostic purpose, and was intended to defend 
the actual reality of the human birth of Jesus, 
against the docetic idea that He was not 
really born of a woman. I am not convinced 
that we can be sure that any direct theological 
motive was involved. It seems likely that 
the clause belongs to the general outline of 
the life of Jesus, which outline forms the sec- 
ond division of the creed. It has been seen 

1 For example by McGiffert in The Apostles' Creed and 
by Allen in Freedom in the Church, 



INTERPRETATION 97 

\ 

that this second division is really the funda- 
mental part of the creed, the heart of which 
was belief in Jesus. Therefore the creed 
gives this outline of His life, and emphasises 
the historic character of His birth, life, death, 
resurrection, and ascension. Thus unques- 
tionably it involves a denial of the Gnostic 
tendency to regard His whole life as hu- 
manly unreal. But that the clause as to His 
birth was especially introduced for this pur- 
pose does not seem evident. That purpose 
was accomplished in the general outline of 
His life, to which this clause naturally be- 
longs. That the early Church attached no 
very distinct theological meaning to the Vir- 
gin Birth is also witnessed to by the fact that 
it is not mentioned in the original form of the 
Nicene Creed as passed in 325 A. d. The 
reason may be that the danger of Gnosticism 
was then passed. But the omission sug- 
gests that we should not look too closely for 
a special dogmatic significance in the early 
belief in the Virgin Birth, or for a special 
dogmatic motive for its introduction into the 
creed. The main motive would seem to 
have been the historical one. 



9 8 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



For our interpretation of the significance 
of the Virgin Birth we must then turn to the 
New Testament. And here I can only re- 
peat what has been already said. The essen- 
tial element of the belief is that Jesus Christ 
is born from above, and is not the mere prod- 
uct of human history. He is the direct gift 
of God, the new beginning of the human 
race. This belief, as we have seen, is com- 
mon to the whole New Testament, and is 
fundamental to the Christian attitude to 
Jesus. To use the modern phrase, Christian 
faith cannot see in Him the mere product of 
evolution. The Incarnation is not an out- 
come of human life, but is a divine act of 
grace. Jesus cannot be explained on the 
basis of His antecedents in humanity. If a 
miracle be the direct expression of God's cre- 
ative will, then Jesus Christ is the miracle of 
history. 

It is evident that some persons will con- 
tend that such a belief is identical with belief 
in the Virgin Birth in the most literal sense. 
Yet there is no evidence that it was so with 
St. Paul, with the author of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, or with St. John. To identify 



INTERPRETATION 



belief in the Incarnation with belief in the 
Virgin Birth, or to assert that the latter is 
essential to the Incarnation is to be wise be- 
yond that which is written. Surely he who 
believes in Jesus Christ as He was believed 
in by St. Paul and by St. John has grasped the 
essential of Christian faith. 

It is not probable, hardly conceivable, that 
any more evidence will ever be obtained on 
the subject of the Virgin Birth. The ques- 
tion as to the historic fact will necessarily be 
approached differently by different minds. 
Those persons in whom the religious interest 
is dominant will probably always feel the 
difficulties less strongly. Those in whom the 
scientific and critical spirit is in the lead will 
doubtless tend to find the fact difficult to ac- 
cept and the evidence unconvincing. It is 
impossible to expect identity of opinion. 
But can there not be expected a unity of faith, 
the faith in Jesus as the direct gift of God, 
that faith which underlies the creed, and 
which these narratives of the Virgin Birth 
enshrine and guard? 

In conclusion it seems in place to express 
again the hope that the controversy in regard 



ioo THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



to this difficult subject should be of a Chris- 
tian character. Controversy that is con- 
ducted in a spirit of hostility and prejudice 
is contrary to the mind of Christ. But con- 
troversy that is in the interest of truth and 
that is carried on with the conviction that 
truth is the friend and not the foe of faith, 
such controversy is Christian. 

One difficulty in this whole problem is that 
the subject does not, and in the nature of the 
case cannot, lend itself to frank and free pub- 
lic discussion. It concerns the relation be- 
tween the spiritual and the physical, and that 
in a matter so sacred that reverence restrains 
us in considering the connection of these two 
elements. When we turn to the Resurrec- 
tion of our Lord we are again concerned with 
the relation between the spiritual and the 
physical, but fortunately in such a form that, 
while the subject is of fundamental impor- 
tance to Christian faith, there is no such ob- 
stacle to a full discussion of the issues in- 
volved. Doubtless it is for this reason that 
the difficulty is not nearly so great in coming 
to an understanding between different views, 



INTERPRETATION 1 0 1 

and to a mutual appreciation of the issues in- 
volved. 

VI 

" The third day he rose again from the 
dead." The creed does not define the nature 
of the risen body of Christ, or the relation 
between the body of His resurrection and the 
body laid at rest in the tomb. Nevertheless 
the subject presents difficulties, and calls for 
consideration. 

We have already discussed the phrase, 
" The Resurrection of the body," or of " the 
flesh," and have seen the difficulty in taking 
literally these words of the creed. And we 
have considered the application to them of 
St. Paul's teaching as to the spiritual body. 
Now the question naturally arises as to 
whether we can think of the resurrection of 
our Lord as the resurrection of the same flesh 
that was laid in the tomb. And if so, was 
His risen body different from the risen body 
of those who rise in Him? If His resurrec- 
tion is the pledge of ours it would seem diffi- 
cult to make any such distinction. 



102 THE APOSTLES , CREED TO-DAY 



When we turn to the New Testament it is 
evident that no such problem was in the mind 
of the writers who record the resurrection of 
Jesus. This is evident from the fact that 
different conceptions go hand in hand without 
any question as to their compatibility. On 
the one hand, there is the conception that His 
risen body was identical with the body laid 
in the tomb, and that it possessed the same 
qualities that belonged to the body of His 
earthly life. In the clearest and most defi- 
nite way the evidence asserts that the tomb 
was empty. There is no trace of any other 
idea in the minds of the disciples. In St. 
Matthew it is declared that the women on 
seeing Jesus after His resurrection took hold 
of His feet. 1 In St. Luke it is asserted that 
Jesus spoke the words, " See my hands and 
my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and 
see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as 
ye behold me having." And it is declared 
that He ate a piece of a broiled fish before 
them. 2 In St. John's Gospel, where most of 
all a purely spiritual idea might have been ex- 
pected, it is declared that the Lord said to 

1 Matt. 28:9. 2 Luke 24: 39-43. 



INTERPRETATION 



Thomas, " Reach hither thy finger, and see 
my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and 
put it into my side." 1 In all these cases it 
seems that the risen body of our Lord is con- 
sidered to be identical with the body of the 
tomb. 

On the other hand there are indications of 
a different idea. In St. Luke's account of the 
appearance to the disciples on the road to 
Emmaus, the disciples failed to recognise 
Jesus until He was known of them in the 
breaking of bread. In the same narrative it 
is told that He vanished out of their sight, 
and appeared again suddenly to them as they 
were with the eleven. 2 In St. John's ac- 
count of His appearances on the evening of 
Easter Day, and eight days later, it is ex- 
pressly declared that the doors were shut. 3 
And in St. Paul's account of the appearance 
of Jesus to him, this appearance, although 
taking place after the ascension, is put on 
exactly the same level as the appearance to 
the other disciples. And St. Paul proceeds 
immediately to discuss the resurrection of the 



1 John 20 : 27. 

2 Luke 24: 30-36. 



3 John 20: verses 19 and 26. 



104 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



dead and the nature of the spiritual body, 
with his whole argument depending on the 
relation between the resurrection of the Lord 
and that of believers. 1 In all these cases the 
thought is evident that the risen body of 
Christ is looked upon as in some respects es- 
sentially different from the fleshly body of 
His earthly life. This same thought is also 
indicated by the statement made by St. John 
and by St. Luke that the clothes in which the 
body was wrapped were found lying in the 
tomb. 2 The fact that the risen body of 
Jesus evidently appeared clothed suggests a 
spiritual interpretation. 

Now our problem to-day is different from 
that in the minds of the New Testament 
writers. They expected the speedy return of 
the Lord and the coming of the Messianic 
kingdom, which was to bring in a new world 
order that was to be eternal. Therefore no 
sharp distinction was in mind between the 
forms of existence of this life and those of 
the life to come. We are to-day in a differ- 

1 See I Cor., chap. 1 5. 

2 See John 20:5-7, an d Luke 24:12. The latter pas- 
sage is however of somewhat doubtful genuineness. 



INTERPRETATION 



ent position. We can no longer think of this 
earth as destined to last forever, and we can 
no longer think of the life beyond in such 
clear and definite form as was done when the 
world to come was conceived of as so close 
at hand. We find ourselves forced to fol- 
low in the path opened by St. Paul. We can 
no longer conceive of our own resurrection 
in forms that belong directly to this life. 
We cannot think of the body that is sown 
as identical with the body that shall be. 
Rather we believe that God will give us a 
body as shall please Him, in such a form of 
existence as we do not now know, but which 
will become clear to us when we no longer 
see through a glass darkly, but face to face. 
And it is inevitable that to many men the 
same problem presents itself in regard to the 
risen body of our Lord. They find great 
difficulty in thinking of it as a physical body 
that could be touched and handled, and that 
was dependent on physical food. And so 
they are forced to look to the more spiritual 
interpretation, suggested in the New Testa- 
ment itself and natural for our thought to- 
day. 



io6 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



What, then, is the essential faith embodied 
in the clause, " The third day he rose again 
from the dead "? It is belief in the fact of 
His resurrection, rather than any theory as 
to its form. The fact is that our Lord 
actually rose from the dead, and actually 
showed Himself to His disciples. No 
merely " subjective " explanation, no theory 
of " visions," no mere conviction that Jesus 
continued to live after His death, expresses 
the fact embodied in the creed. The belief 
there embodied is that of a direct and posi- 
tive manifestation of the risen Lord. But 
the particular way in which that manifesta- 
tion took place does not belong to the essence 
of the creed. There is room for differences 
of interpretation made necessary by different 
conceptions of the life to come. 

Some years ago there appeared a novel 
entitled " When It Was Dark." The story 
represents the whole Christian world as 
plunged into despair by the supposed discov- 
ery of an ancient writing proving that the 
disciples had secretly carried away the body 
of the Lord. Such a despair, even on the 
basis of an hypothesis so absurd, does not 



INTERPRETATION 



express the true Christian faith. True 
Christian faith is not faith in the empty 
tomb, but in the risen and triumphant Lord. 

This discussion of the interpretation of the 
different articles of the Apostles' Creed 
makes no claim to be exhaustive. And, of 
course, the interpretations herein suggested 
make no claim to finality. In the nature of 
the case such interpretations must vary ac- 
cording to the point of view of the individual 
as well as of the age. The sole purpose has 
been to illustrate the main thesis, that the 
creed necessarily contains a permanent and a 
progressive element. The permanent ele- 
ment is loyalty to Jesus Christ. The pro- 
gressive element is found in the various and 
necessarily changing forms in which that 
loyalty is expressed. 



THE VALUE AND USE OF THE 
CREED TO-DAY 



V 



THE VALUE AND USE OF THE CREED 



'HE outcome of the preceding chapter 



* may seem to be that we can manage to 
get along with the creed, but that we should 
be better off without it; that the creed is a 
necessary evil of which we should make the 
best. Such a result would be unsatisfactory 
enough, and would certainly contradict the 
purpose of the whole previous discussion. It 
would, I believe, equally contradict the facts 
of history, and be blind to the value and use 
of the creed to-day. We must try then to 
sum up our results, and to come to a conclu- 
sion as to the positive value of the creed. 
In so doing we must refer to our general 
discussion in the first chapter, with the light 
cast upon it by our study of the character and 
interpretation of the Apostles' Creed. 



TO-DAY 




in 



H2 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



I 

It is of special importance to bear in mind 
that the creed is a badge of a corporate fel- 
lowship. It is not a purely individualistic 
matter. If religion were purely individual- 
istic there would be no need of a creed. 
There would doubtless be a theology, but not 
a creed in the technical sense as we have dis- 
cussed the meaning of the term. A creed 
expresses the common allegiance of a cor- 
porate fellowship. And a Christian creed, 
the Apostles' Creed, expresses a common al- 
legiance to Christ, who is the basis of the 
Christian fellowship. 

Thus the creed and the Church are vitally 
connected. For the Church is the outward 
) and visible expression of the fellowship of 
Lfche Kingdom of God. It is not, of course, 
identical with that fellowship. There are 
members of the Church who are not truly 
members of the invisible, spiritual fellowship 
that is rooted and grounded in Christ. Even 
the early Church included an Ananias and a 
Sapphira. And also there are those who are 
not members of this visible Church, yet whose 



VALUE AND USE 113 

hearts and lives give undoubted testimony to 
the presence of vital Christian fellowship. 
There are those who cast out devils in the 
name of Jesus, and yet walk not in the estab- 
lished paths with His disciples. By their 
works ye shall know them. Thus the Church 
is not identical with the Christian fellowship. 
Nevertheless it stands as the outward and 
visible expression of that fellowship, the Sac- 
rament of the inward and spiritual reality of 
the Kingdom of God. Its task is to convert 
the world into that Kingdom, to transform 
all life into the spiritual commonwealth of 
Christ. 

When that task is accomplished, there will 
be no difference between the Church and the 
Kingdom of God. All life will have been 
taken up into that fellowship. In the vision 
of the new Jerusalem St. John saw no tem- 
ple, for the Lord God Almighty and the 
Lamb are the temple thereof. When that 
time comes there will be no Sacraments, for 
all life will be sacramental; there will be no 
Church separate from the rest of life, for all 
life will be under the rule of Christ. But 
that time is far off. The kingdoms of this 



1 1 4 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



world are as yet far different from the com- 
monwealth of the new Jerusalem. And 
meanwhile the Church is the organic means 
for bringing in that divine reality. It is the 
outward and visible expression of the King- 
dom of God. 

If in any such sense as this there be a 
Church, then that Church is an organic real- 
ity, as much as is the Nation. And it has 
its marks of entrance and of membership. 
Baptism has always been the sign of entrance 
to the Church. And the Apostles' Creed is 
a baptismal creed. It expresses allegiance to 
Christ, and it accompanies Baptism into His 
Church. The creed is not a purely individ- 
ualistic thing. It is vitally connected with 
the whole idea of the Church. He who en- j 
ters the Church accepts the creed as the testi- 
mony to his allegiance to Christ, its Lord and i 
Master, 

The creed is not a necessary evil to be 
made the best of. Unless indeed laws and 
constitutions are necessary evils to the State. 
Unless indeed liberty goes with abolition of 
law. But if liberty in the State comes 
through constitutions and laws, then liberty 



VALUE AND USE 115 

in the Church is in no opposition to the creed 
of allegiance to the Christ who makes us free. 

The Church stands for loyalty to Jesus 
Christ. It does not and cannot seek to in- 
clude in its membership those who do not 
profess that loyalty. It has no place for a 
divided allegiance, any more than has the 
Nation. If that be tyranny, make the most 
of it! If that be narrowness, then the 
Church is narrow. Its entrance is indeed by 
the narrow path that leads to the fulness of 
the life with Christ. 

Would then the abolition of the creed 
make for liberty in the Church? Not unless 
the abolition of laws makes for liberty in the 
State. Laws may indeed be misused. They 
may be harshly applied. They may be nar- 
rowly interpreted. Every man can read the 
signs of the times which in the State to-day 
demand that laws be made to serve freedom 
and not tyranny. Only the fool can suppose 
that that demand means the abolition of law. 
So may the creed be narrowly interpreted and 
harshly applied. It would be blindness in- 
deed to shut our eyes to such narrow inter- 
pretations, or to fail to recognise that they 



n6 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



seriously threaten the liberty of the Church. 
But the road to that liberty lies in the true use 
of the creed and not in its abolition. We 
must get back to the historical essence of the 
creed. We must recognise that its details * 
demand new interpretations for new times. 
So it has always been in the history of the 
Church. The creed itself has been reshaped 
to meet these new demands, and its details 
have continually received new interpreta- 
tions. The discussion in the preceding chap-^ 
ter has not therefore been intended to play 
fast and loose with the historical contents of 
the creed. It has attempted to get back to 
those historical contents, and to show that the 
historical essence of the creed is belief in Je- 
sus Christ and in the revelation of God given 
in Him. 

II 

From a purely practical point of view it 
can also be seen that the abolition of the 
creed would not make for liberty. Every or- 
ganisation must in some way or other con- 
trol its own membership. It is in the inter- 
est of freedom that the basis of that member- 



VALUE AND USE 117 

ship be clearly understood. Otherwise it is 
dependent on passing moods of thought. 
Once again the analogy of the State is help- 
ful. An accused man has definite law to ap- 
peal to. That law is his protection from a 
mere tyranny of judge and jury. By that 
law his rights are secured. So it is with the 
Church. The history of the Church is full 
of changing moods, of passing opinions, of 
adjustments to new modes of thinking. Such 
new modes of thinking have often seemed to 
be unchristian. They have been denied their 
place in the Church. Oftentimes the Church 
has in one period regarded as heretics those 
whose orthodoxy in a later age has been un- 
questioned. Every new thinker has run the 
risk of heresy. Now if the Church had been 
able, without any regard for creed, to ban- 
ish from its membership any one whom the 
passing orthodoxy condemned, not only 
would the individual have suffered, but the 
Church would have been disastrously injured. 
It is by appeal to a creed, to law, that at once^ 
the rights of the individual and the breadth 
of the Church have been maintained. To 
have abandoned creeds would have injured 1 



n8 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



the freedom of the individual and the large- 
^ness of the Church. 

With all Christian kindness it may be ques- 
tioned as to whether in Unitarianism the 
abandonment of all creeds has resulted in 
complete liberty of thought, or in producing 
the largest field of religious experience. No 
subscription or profession of belief is of 
course required of minister or layman. Why 
then does it happen that Unitarianism seems 
to have no place for belief in the orthodox 
doctrines of the Trinity or the Incarnation? 
Why does it happen that when Unitarians 
come to accept those beliefs they cease to be 
Unitarians? Are those beliefs so absurd 
that they cannot be held by any men whose 
thought is free? That would seem to be a 
somewhat rash assertion. Why then is the 
liberty of Unitarianism apparently always 
used to the denial of those beliefs and never 
to their acceptance? Why is it that there 
seems to be in Unitarianism no field for such 
a widespread type of Christian experience? 
A Unitarian minister is free to believe and to 
preach what he will. Suppose he were to 



VALUE AND USE 119 

believe in and to preach the Trinity and the 
Incarnation, would he be likely to find a Uni- 
tarian congregation that would welcome him 
as its pastor? Has the absence of a creed 
really produced the broadest field for Chris- 
tian experience? 

The fact is that mere abstract, indefinite 
liberty does not exist. Liberty is the right to 
express one's self in relation to a concrete, 
definite environment. Liberty in the State is 
liberty to be a citizen of the State. It is 
not liberty to destroy the State or to injure 
it. There are necessarily limits. And the 
same is true of liberty of thought, at any rate 
if thought express itself in speech or action. 
There are necessarily limits both in State 
and Church. The question is not, How can 
an absolutely indefinite liberty be attained? 
but rather, What is the largest liberty that 
can exist in regard to the actual concrete con- 
ditions of life ? And in the Church the creed, 
by making allegiance to Christ the founda- 
tion of liberty, maintains and fosters far more 
liberty than it prevents. Of course the creed 
has difficulties. It has difficulties because all 



120 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



advance in thinking has difficulties. But the 
difficulties that exist with the creed are far 
less than the difficulties that exist without it. 

ill 

If it be granted that some kind of a creed 
is necessary for the Church, may it not be 
maintained that we should have a new creed 
instead of an old one, that we should take 
our Apostles' Creed and bring it up to date, 
reshape it in such a way that it would be 
free from any need of new interpretation, 
and would be in clear accord with the neces- 
sities of modern thought? 

It might be answered that such a proposal 
is purely academic and incapable of realisa- 
tion. Or that if realised by any part of 
the Christian Church, it would only add an- 
other to existing creeds, and would therefore 
be a positive injury to Christian unity. But 
much more may be said. Even if practicable 
and even if realised by the whole Church, 
such a result would be undesirable. Make 
the creed up to date, up to the present day 
of the present year. How long would it 
stay up to date ? How long would it be be- 



VALUE AND USE 



121 



fore to-day would become yesterday? The 
world moves, and the Church moves with it, 
because it is the living Church. Get rid of 
the difficulties to-day, and new ones will ap- 
pear to-morrow. And those difficulties will 
be all the greater because of the revision of 
the creed. For such a revision implies that 
now all difficulties and all new interpreta- 
tions are set aside, and that now the creed can 
be imposed in an absolutely literal way, and 
as a final statement of truth. The new-made 
creed that was intended to give freedom to 
one generation would hang like a fetter upon 
the freedom of the next. The creed comes 
to us from the early period of tKcTXhurch's 
life. It has remained unaltered for more 
than a thousand years. It expresses truths' 
which have been wrought out in the process 
of history, and which are therefore necessar- 
ily open to the wider interpretation that that 
process of history involves. Such a creed of- 
fers a far more sound basis for liberty than 
a new-made creed claiming the right to be lit- 
erally and narrowly enforced. 

Indeed such an attempt to construct a creed 
or symbol in an absolutely up to date form 



122 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



and as a final statement of Christian truth is 
of the very essence of sectarianism. For sec- 
tarianism is not a thing that can be identified 
with any special division of the Christian 
Church. It is a spirit that may be found in 
any part of the Church. It conceives of the 
Church as being united by agreement in cer- 
tain doctrines or theories, instead of being 
united in Christ. And no part of the Church 
is free from that danger. If the Thirty-Nine 
Articles were looked upon as the basis of 
unity, the English Church and the Episcopal 
Church would be sectarian. So long as 
Rome maintains its rigid attitude toward the 
decrees of the Council of Trent, it cannot 
shake off the spirit of a sect. If the various 
Protestant Churches make their special con- 
fessions a finality, they become sectarian in 
essence. 

The same attitude may be taken even to- 
ward the creed. If it is made absolutely final N 
and binding in every detail, if it is given a 
hard and fast interpretation with no room for 
development of thought, then it becomes es- 
sentially a sectarian symbol. The Church is 
sometimes regarded as a society with certain * 



VALUE AND USE 123 

definite terms of entrance and membership, 
like those of any club. Those terms are 
plainly and literally expressed in the creedj 
and he who departs from that plain and lit-, 
eral sense has no right to retain his member- 
ship. If any member does not like the terms! 
he may leave the society. But that is the 
sectarian attitude. It puts the creed in the 
place of Christ. And such a sectarian atti- 
tude would be greatly furthered by an attempt 
to remake the creed " up to date." To re- 
shape it for our own special needs would be 
to narrow its interpretation and to limit its 
value. If the Church be merely a club, then 
that attitude is logical. But if the Church be 
Catholic, then Christ is the basis of its unity. 
He who is loyal to Jesus Christ has his place 
in Christ's Church, and has his right to the, 
creed that is the expression of that loyalty.] 
Freedom lies in the very age of the creedj 
The creed formed in the early ages of the 
Church, based upon loyalty to Christ, wit- 
nessed to by Holy Scripture, expressing con- 
victions wrought out in the life of the Church 
and open to the wider interpretations that 
come from the leading of the Spirit of God, 



124 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



that creed is our guarantee of the liberty that 
is in Christ. 

IV 

Something remains to be said of the use of 
the creed, or of the creeds, in worship. 
There are some persons who, while recognis- 
ing the need of a creed, yet find it an alien 
element in worship. Why in the midst of 
worship should we be called on to express our 
agreement with the articles of the creed? 

I find it somewhat difficult to do justice to 
this attitude, because my own feeling to the 
creed in worship is of a fundamentally dif- 
ferent character. To me the creed seems to 
lie at the very centre of common worship, the 
heart of which is the common allegiance to 
Jesus Christ. 

Every great passion rests on a conviction 
of truth. There is no passion, no fighting 
power, in indifference to truth. Especially 
is this true of every great passion that is not 
merely individualistic but corporate, that ex- 
presses a common purpose and a common 
life. And Christianity is essentially such a 
corporate passion. Primitive Christianity 



VALUE AND USE 125 

drew its power from a common allegiance, a 
common conviction of truth, and a common 
passion resulting from that allegiance. Thus 
it attacked the heathen world. The men 
who gave us the creeds were men who cared. 
When indifference reigns, Christianity is 
dead. In Chesterton's " The Ball and the 
Cross " two men, a Christian and an atheist, 
fall in love with each other because in an in- 
different world they two seem to be the only 
men who care whether there be a God or no. 
The foe of Christ is indifference, a more in- 
sidious foe than open hostility. If the 
Church is to have power to-day it must re- 
vive that corporate passion for an attack on a 
world that is in tragic need of the truth as it 
is in Jesus. 

The creed in worship is not a mere utter- \ 
ance of abstract doctrines. It is the badge 
of allegiance to Christ, a common allegiance 
expressing a common passion and a common 
purpose. It may be questioned if the creed 
has a place in private devotion. At any rate^ 
its supreme place is in the common worship \ 
of the Church, the Church united, voicing its \ 
allegiance to its Lord, and committing itself 



126 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



I to its common task of winning the world to 
^Him. The creed is at the very heart of wor- 
ship. It carries with it the thrill that be- 
longs to the flag of one's country. It is the 
banner of our faith, the symbol of loyalty 
\tp the Captain of our salvation. 

Viewed in this light the various clauses of 
ithe creed become full of meaning and of 
, power. Consider some of them. The creed 
begins with the Name of God, not only the 
Name of Father, but of Father Almighty. 
On that Almightiness we depend, to it we 
appeal. In presence of a world in which 
armies and battleships seem to possess su- 
preme power, in which mammon aspires to 
rule, in which sin asserts its dominion, we 
appeal to the Almightiness of the divine 
Fatherhood, to the supremacy of the power 
of love. That is the power that shall pre- 
vail. The kingdom of divine love is greater 
than the kingdom of this world. In that con- 
fidence we pledge our allegiance to the God 
whose power is revealed in the cross of lov- 
ing sacrifice, whose Name of Father is man- 
ifested in His only Son, our Lord. 

Then follows the majestic outline of the 



VALUE AND USE 



gospel story. Our God is no distant Being. 
He has been given to us in human history, 
sharing our life, made real to us in our mani- 
fold experiences, entering into the depths of 
all that belongs to our humanity. Conceived 
by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary : 
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, 
dead, and buried: He descended into hell. 
Those are mighty words, " He descended 
into hell." Whatever doubt there be as to 
their original meaning, they at any rate stand 
for this : there is no human experience that is 
remote from His, no depth of doubt or de- 
spair or sin that can take us out of the reach 
of the divine love. They are mighty words 
in time of trouble. There is no hell into 
which we can enter where we shall not find 
the Lord Christ. He has touched our hu- 
man life at every point. And He has 
touched it with the power of victory. The 
third day He rose again from the dead. He 
ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the 
right hand of God the Father Almighty. 
Therein is His victory already ours. And 
we look forward with joy and confidence to 
the final manifestation of that victory, when 



128 THE APOSTLES' CREED TO-DAY 



He shall come to judge the quick and the 
dead, when His Kingdom shall be established 
in power, and His will be done on earth as 
it is in heaven. 

I believe in the Holy Ghost. God is no 
distant Being, and He has not simply been 
revealed in the history of the past. He is in 
living contact with His world to-day. By 
that belief in the Holy Ghost our faith is no 
matter of the dead past. God is the living 
God. To that present and living God we 
appeal. He is manifested in His Holy Cath- 
olic Church. In Him is the Communion of 
Saints, the supreme fellowship of men, 
founded on the fellowship with God. From 
Him is the forgiveness of sins. And He is 
the source and pledge of a life that is beyond 
the power of death. And so we end with the 
triumphant words, I believe in the Resurrec- 
tion of the body, and in the Life everlasting. 
And the Amen is the sign of our confidence in 
God's pledge. It is established. So be it. 
The truth stands firm. In that Amen we sum 
up our allegiance to the Master, our faith in 
the Father whom He has revealed, our con- 



VALUE AND USE 129 

fidence in the victorious power of His Holy 
Spirit. 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and 
to the Holy Ghost. 

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever 
shall be, world without end. Amen. 



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